Living Song

The team with Living Song believe that every child and young person regardless of age, gender, disability, colour, race, nationality, or ethnic or national origins, religious beliefs, sexual orientation has at all time and in all situations the right to feel safe and protected form any situation or practice that results in a child or young person being physically or psychologically damaged.

In our organisation, if we have suspicions about a participant’s physical, sexual or emotional well being, we will take action. We will protect our participants by:

• Ensuring any worker, artist, musician, freelancer or volunteer that comes into contact with them has police and health checks, and follows our code of conduct of working with children and young people and vulnerable adults.
• Ensuring new workers, artists, musicians, freelancers, volunteers or members of the organisation will complete a personal profile form.
• Requesting previous addresses on volunteer/job application forms
• Asking for names and two referees who will be prepared to give written reference.
• Following up each reference with a phone call or personal contact during which we will discuss the applicant’s suitability to work with children and young people. a record of this discussion will be kept on the applicants file.
• We will interview prospective workers, artists, musicians, freelancers or volunteers and observe them working in their current, or related context.
• We will carry out a probationary period for all workers, artists, musicians, freelancers or volunteers and staff of a proportion of the project time or 3 months if 6months or longer
• Regularly monitor and review our procedures on child and young people to ensure the safety of all the vulnerable people we work with.

All volunteers, freelancers and staff are encouraged to share concerns with the Living Song child protection officer. If the situation is clearly an urgent case, the child/venerable adult is too frightened to go home or there are very serious doubts about the child’s safety, we will contact social services or the police immediately.

If concerns about a child, young person or vulnerable adult are more general, then the matter will be discussed with the Living Song child protection officer who would then make a referral to social services who will make the necessary arrangements.

Code of Practice – Workshops

Living Song is committed to safeguarding the welfare of the children we work with and has established the following code of practice

• All workers, artists, musicians, freelancer or volunteer are given clear and established roles for their education work
• All existing workers, artists, musicians, freelancers or volunteers used by the organisation are police checked to ensure that no one has a conviction for criminal offences against children
• When working with schools, all workshops are conducted in the presence of a teacher
• Livng Song works in teams of at least two people, unless a relationship is already established with a group, in which case an individual may work alone
• Children are always supervised at all times during projects, including lunch breaks and travel to and from the venue
• Workshop leaders will be responsible for ensuring health and safety requirements are met in the working environment
• Full evaluations are carried out after all workshops, completed by teachers/staff members, to ensure that any problems are aired and area addressed in the future.

Role and Responsibilities of the Designated Child Protection Person (DCPP)

Living Song has appointed  a designated child protection person who is responsible for dealing with any concerns about the protection of children. This person Jane Wheeler is contactable by web form on Contact Us page. On projects the Project Manager will be the first person to report to, s/he will then report to the Living Song DCPP

The role of the designated person is to:

1. know which outside child protection agency to contact in the event of a child protection concern coming to the notice of the Board
2. provide information and advice on child protection within the Board
3. ensure that appropriate information is available at the time of referral and that the referral is confirmed in writing under confidential cover
4. liaise with local social services and other agencies, as appropriate
5. keep relevant people within the Board informed about any action taken and any further action required: for example, disciplinary action against a member for staff
6. ensure that a proper record is kept of any referral and action taken, and this is kept safely and in confidence
7. advise the Board of child protection training needs: and
8. liase with the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) to review the operation of the Child Protection Policy regularly to ensure the procedures are working and that it complies with current best practice.

We have tried to make this website as accessible as possible and easy to use for everyone, regardless of circumstance or ability.

All our page templates comply with the WCAG Priority 1 checkpoints as a minimum requirement. And we make every effort to ensure that all the content on our site meets this standard too.

We developed the design and layout of the site so that it can be used by blind or partially sighted users. It is compatible with screen readers and can be navigated without the use of a mouse or keyboard.

We are making every effort to ensure that we don’t exclude any users. For example:

• We try to use clear and simple language.
• We use alternative text for all our images
• The HTML we produce conforms to the standard: XHTML 1.0 Transitional
• We always include a text transcript when we publish videos on our blogs (or vlogs).
• We have tested the colours we use in the design for contrast.

We try to publish all our text content as accessible HTML rather than in other formats such as PDF. Where we do publish PDFs or other formats our policy is to make them as accessible as we can.

We decided not to use access keys after they caused confusion in our user testing. (The users who might have benefited from access keys already used keyboard shortcuts, and said that additional, site-specific access keys were not helpful.)

Please contact us if you have any questions, if you are having difficulties using the site, or would like to know more about what we are doing to make our websites accessible.