Child Protection and Safeguarding Policy

This is Pushing Out the Boat’s child protection policy. Its purpose is to ensure that young people’s experience of Pushing Out the Boat is both safe and positive.

Pushing Out the Boat magazine is keen to support and promote new writing and visual art by young people aged 12-17 in the North East of Scotland and elsewhere. We invite submissions to our biennial magazine from young people and successful submitters are invited to read or display work at our events, primarily the launch of a new issue.

When young people submit work to Pushing Out the Boat we collect essential data from them to allow us to identify and communicate with them and understand how successful we are in attracting submissions from that age group. We hold information securely in accordance with our Privacy Policy. Only four named team members have access to this information, our chair/webmaster, secretary, coordinator, and editor. Communication with young people and their parents/guardian is from these named individuals only.

When they register on our website, we require young people to confirm that a parent or guardian has agreed they can submit work to the magazine.

We mark submissions from young people with a “Y“ but evaluate them anonymously by expert panels who have no access to young people’s personal details.

We invite young people whose work is accepted for publication to attend the launch of the magazine to read or display their contributions. We require them to bring a parent or guardian with them or another adult approved by their parent or guardian e.g. a teacher.

We may publicise contributors to the magazine on our website or other media, including photos of contributors. We seek the permission of parents/guardian before including publicity about young contributors.

Team members other than those named above may volunteer to help at our events. If any young contributors or other young people are likely to attend, the team members’ briefing includes bringing this policy to their attention.

We have designated a team member as our child protection lead. The lead has a Basic Disclosure check from Disclosure Scotland. Should you have any concerns about this policy or our practices in relation to young people, you may contact them at childprotection@pushingouttheboat.co.uk.

In the unlikely event of any team member believing that information about a young person should be shared with a child protection agency, we will only do this via our child protection lead.

We will review this policy in the light of experience every two years before we begin the cycle of publishing another issue of our magazine.

This policy is available in the About section of our website. It was agreed at a meeting of trustees on 23 November 2023 and has been developed through a risk assessment in accordance with the NSPCC’s Safeguarding and Child Protection Standards for the Voluntary and Community Sector Children and young people aged 0–18. You can see the standards on their website here.

Last updated: January 2024