Working With Children Check (SA)
CodesAPI credentialType WWCC_SASpreadsheet import wwcc with State SAAll credential codes
A Working With Children Check (WWC) is the clearance required to do child-related work in South Australia, administered by the Department of Human Services (DHS) Screening Unit. South Australia publishes no public validation page, so Oho signs in to the DHS Screening Unit portal on your behalf.
Who needs it
Anyone engaged in child-related work in South Australia, employees and volunteers alike.
What Oho needs
The check number, the holder's full name, and their date of birth — South Australia won't match a worker without one.
SRN 1234-5678 — an eight-digit Screening Request Number. Oho tidies the formatting for you, so SRN12345678, srn 1234 5678 and 12345678 all reach the portal in the shape it expects.
Older records may carry a six-digit DCSI number instead, from before the Screening Unit was renamed: 123456. Oho accepts those too.
South Australia matches on first, middle and last name together, not just a surname — so a middle name on file that the register doesn't hold, or vice versa, can be the reason a check doesn't match.
Like NSW, the DHS Screening Unit matches on date of birth, and a worker without one can't be checked. If you're importing, fill in Date of Birth; see Spreadsheet columns.
SA checks only run through your organisation's own DHS Screening Unit portal login. Until that source is connected, Oho has no way to ask about an SA card, so every SA check on your workers keeps whatever status and expiry it was given when it was loaded — from a spreadsheet, a migration, or whoever typed it in — and nothing ever re-checks it.
That's why an SA card showing Expired in Oho while the SA Gov screening site says it's valid is usually not a data mismatch. It's a card nobody has checked since the day it was imported. See Connect your SA source below.
Before you start
South Australia needs your organisation's DHS Screening Unit portal login, configured once as a Verification Source. There's no anonymous route — the portal is the only way to check an SA clearance.
Unlike the public-register checks, SA runs against a per-tenant service that Oho deploys for you. It isn't self-service: if SA verification hasn't been enabled for your organisation, you can still save a source and it will sit there checking nothing.
Email [email protected] to have SA checks switched on before you work through the setup steps. You'll know it's outstanding if credentials stay Pending and Verify credential does nothing — the message on the credential says a verifier isn't available in this environment.
Sign-in is protected by a one-time code. Oho can collect that code automatically from a dedicated mailbox, which is set up when the source is configured; where it can't, an administrator supplies the code once and Oho holds the session for a couple of hours.
A wrong password or a locked account doesn't come back as "this worker isn't clear" — it comes back as an error. If every SA check turns red or errors at once, look at the Verification Source before you look at the workers.
How Oho verifies it
Oho signs in to the DHS Screening Unit portal and searches for each worker. Once signed in, a check takes well under a minute — most come back in five to thirty seconds.
On the first successful match, Oho registers your organisation's interest with DHS on your behalf. The worker then appears on the portal's monitored list, and later scans read that list — so a status change is picked up without a fresh search each time.
Reading the result
Every check resolves to one of these outcomes:
| Status (as shown in the app) | Colour | What it means | API value (eligibility) |
|---|---|---|---|
| May engage | Green | Valid and current — the person is cleared for the work. | MAY_ENGAGE |
| May not engage | Red | Not valid — expired, suspended, not found, or a match on a ban register. | MAY_NOT_ENGAGE |
| Under review | Yellow | No decision yet — someone has to read the result and record one. Not a softer kind of pass: the worker counts as non-compliant until they do. | REVIEW_REQUIRED |
| In progress | Blue | Still being checked. | IN_PROGRESS |
| Couldn't verify | Grey | The source couldn't be reached; Oho will try again. | ERROR |
Validity and expiry are tracked separately from that verdict, and the badge always shows the most serious state on record — so these appear instead of one of the five above:
| Status (as shown in the app) | Colour | What it means | API value (statusDetail) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Expiring soon | Yellow | Still valid, but inside your expiry lead time — 30 days by default. Time to get the renewal moving. | EXPIRING_SOON |
| Expired | Red | The expiry date has passed, so the worker is no longer covered. | EXPIRED |
| Conditions to review | Yellow | The register attached a condition or a notation that someone has to read and decide on. | CONDITIONS_TO_REVIEW |
| Pending decision | Blue | The issuing authority has yet to decide on an application. | PENDING_DECISION |
A problem the register reports outright — the clearance revoked, no matching record, a newer card superseding this one — shows under its own name in red or grey, alongside the same statusDetail value. Every one of them is listed in what a check result means.
South Australia has its own status vocabulary:
| What the register says | What Oho shows | Why |
|---|---|---|
Cleared, Not Prohibited | May engage | Current clearance |
Not Cleared, Prohibited | May not engage | An active bar on child-related work |
Cleared, but past its validity | May not engage | Cleared once, now expired |
| No matching record | Under review | See the note below — this is not treated as a failure |
| Anything else | Under review | Wording Oho doesn't recognise |
On most registers, no matching record means red. Here it means Under review.
The reason is that SA matches on three name parts plus a date of birth, so a non-match is far more likely to be a data mismatch than a genuine absence of clearance — and marking a worker as not clear on that basis would be wrong. It's routed to a person to look at instead.
When it doesn't verify
| What you see | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Under review — no matching record | Name, date of birth or number doesn't match the Screening Unit's record | Check the full name including middle names, then the date of birth, then the number |
| Under review after a name change | The register may hold the previous name. SA has no automatic alternate-name retry | Update the worker's name to match the register and re-run |
| Couldn't verify — sign-in failed | The portal login is wrong, locked, or the one-time code couldn't be collected | Check the credentials on the Verification Source. This is a source problem, not a worker problem |
| In progress and never resolves | The SA source isn't fully configured | Confirm the Verification Source has a portal login and an organisation mapping |
| Pending or In progress, and Verify credential appears to do nothing | SA verification hasn't been switched on for your tenant yet. The source saves, the fetch request completes, and the check has nowhere to run | Open the credential and read the message on it. If it mentions a verifier not being available in this environment, ask [email protected] to enable SA WWCC verification — retrying won't help, and the credentials pick up on their own once it's on |
| Expired in Oho but the SA site says the card is valid | No SA verification source is connected, so the card still carries its imported status and has never been checked | Connect your SA source. Statuses correct themselves on the first run — don't edit them one by one |
| Under review on many workers at once | Usually a name-format mismatch across an import rather than a real compliance problem | Look at one worker in the portal to see what name format it holds, then fix the import |
| Two SA sources and neither is used | Oho couldn't tell which organisation's login applies | Map each source to its organisation so the right login is picked |
Connect your SA source
Two things have to happen, in this order:
- Ask Oho to switch SA verification on for your organisation — email [email protected]. This is the part that isn't self-service.
- Add the verification source with your DHS Screening Unit portal login. DHS Screening Unit — Working With Children Check (SA) has the full steps, including the code address DHS has to send your sign-in codes to.
Once the source runs, every SA card in your tenant is checked against the Screening Unit and its status and expiry are replaced with what the register actually holds. You don't need to correct anything by hand first — and it's better not to, because the register's answer will overwrite a typed status on the next run anyway.
You can correct an expiry date by hand on the credential if you need the compliance figures to be roughly right in the meantime. Oho remembers that a person set it, and a later import won't drag it backwards. A register check will still replace it, which is the point.
Renewals & monitoring
Renewals flow through automatically — the check number stays the same, and the registered interest means DHS shows the updated status on the monitored list.
Because the interest registration does the heavy lifting, SA monitoring is efficient: later scans read the monitored list rather than re-searching every worker. The thing to watch isn't renewals but access — the whole arrangement depends on your portal login continuing to work, so a password change on the DHS side is what breaks SA monitoring, not anything about the workers.