Safeguarding policy | Top Tutors Scotland

Safeguarding and child protection policy

Top Tutors Scotland teaches young people, one to one, online. Most of our pupils are between 14 and 18.

That is a position of trust, and it carries responsibilities we take seriously. This policy sets out how we protect the young people we teach, what we expect of our tutors, and what to do if anyone is worried about a child.

It is written to be read by parents, by pupils, and by tutors. If you are worried about a child right now, skip to “How to raise a concern”.

If a child is in immediate danger

Call Police Scotland on 999.

Do not wait, and do not contact us first. Our forms and inbox are not monitored out of hours and are not the right route for anything urgent.

Police Scotland, non-emergency: 101
Your local council’s social work duty team, or its out-of-hours emergency service
Childline: 0800 1111, free, 24 hours, for young people
Parentline Scotland (Children 1st): 08000 28 22 33

Our commitment

The wellbeing of the young people we teach comes before our reputation, our convenience and our commercial interests. If those ever pull in different directions, the child wins.
Every child has a right to be safe, whatever their background, ethnicity, religion, disability, additional support need, gender identity or sexual orientation.
We listen to young people. A pupil who tells us something is worrying them will be taken seriously.
Everyone who works with our pupils is checked, trained and knows what to do.
Safeguarding is not one person’s job, but one person is responsible for it here.

Who this applies to

This policy applies to everyone acting for Top Tutors Scotland: the founder, every tutor, and anyone else who has contact with pupils or with information about them. Tutors are self-employed contractors, and following this policy is a term of their contract with us.

The framework we work to

We follow the Scottish child protection framework:

National Guidance for Child Protection in Scotland 2021 (updated 2023)
Getting It Right For Every Child (GIRFEC), and the wellbeing indicators — safe, healthy, achieving, nurtured, active, respected, responsible, included
Children (Scotland) Act 1995 and Children (Scotland) Act 2020
Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014
Protection of Vulnerable Groups (Scotland) Act 2007, as amended by the Disclosure (Scotland) Act 2020
United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (Incorporation) (Scotland) Act 2024
Age of Legal Capacity (Scotland) Act 1991, on a young person’s own capacity to decide

We do not work to the English framework. Keeping Children Safe in Education, Working Together to Safeguard Children and the Children Act 1989 do not apply in Scotland, and any template that cites them has been written for the wrong country.

Our safeguarding contact

Safeguarding concerns should be sent to safeguarding@toptutorsscotland.co.uk. Until a dedicated safeguarding mailbox is established, this company-controlled address is the monitored route for raising a concern. Do not send an urgent concern through email: follow the emergency instructions at the start of this policy.

All current tutors have completed safeguarding essentials training, and every new tutor must complete it before teaching a student. We retain evidence of completion. Training is separate from PVG membership and neither one replaces the other.

Tutor recruitment and PVG

Nobody teaches a pupil until every one of these is complete.

1. Application and CV. Academic background, qualifications and teaching experience.

2. Interview and a sample lesson. A proper conversation about the subject and how they teach it, then a lesson they plan and deliver.

3. Verification. Before a tutor meets a pupil, we verify:

their right to work in the UK
their PVG scheme membership for regulated work with children
their academic qualifications, against the original documents
professional references, taken up and followed up

No exceptions and no shortcuts. A tutor who is waiting for a PVG outcome does not teach in the meantime.

PVG scheme membership

Teaching children one to one is regulated work with children under the Protection of Vulnerable Groups (Scotland) Act 2007. Every tutor holds PVG scheme membership for regulated work with children before their first lesson.

We check membership through Disclosure Scotland. We record the membership number and the date we checked. We do not keep the disclosure document itself for longer than we need it.

PVG membership is no longer for life. From 1 April 2026, membership runs on a five-year cycle and must be renewed. We record each tutor’s renewal date and check it. A tutor whose membership lapses stops teaching until it is back in place.

Training

Every tutor completes child protection training before their first lesson and refreshes it at least every two years, and sooner where guidance, their role or an incident shows that an earlier update is needed. Training must cover recognising, responding to, recording and reporting concerns in a Scottish child-protection context.

We keep a record of who has been trained and when.

Online, one to one: how we keep lessons safe

Every lesson we teach puts one adult and one young person alone in a virtual room. That is the nature of one-to-one tuition, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. So the controls sit around it.

The platform

Lessons take place on Google Meet, with Google Classroom used for homework, using a Top Tutors Scotland account.

Tutors do not use personal accounts and do not set up lessons themselves outside our system.
Every lesson is scheduled through us, so there is a record of who taught whom, when, and for how long.
Lessons do not happen on personal video calls, social media, gaming platforms or anything else.

Cameras and setting

Cameras stay on, for both the tutor and the pupil, for the whole lesson. If a pupil will not turn their camera on, the tutor ends the lesson and tells us.
Lessons happen in an ordinary living space wherever possible — a kitchen table, a living room, a desk in a family room. Not a bedroom, on either side, unless there is genuinely no alternative and the parent knows.
Both tutor and pupil dress as they would for a lesson in person.
Backgrounds should be plain and should not show other people, personal information or anything inappropriate.
Tutors do not teach from a public place where a lesson can be overheard.

Parents

You are welcome to be in the room, nearby, or within earshot for any lesson. You never need to ask permission, and you never need a reason.
You can ask to see the written feedback after any lesson, and you receive it after every lesson by email in any case.
You can ask us about how a lesson is going at any time.
We ask that an adult is at home, or contactable, while a lesson is happening.

Recording

Lessons are not recorded. We make no video or audio recording of a lesson, so there is no footage of a child for us to store, secure, retain or lose. This was a deliberate choice for V1 rather than an omission, and reinstating it would need this policy, the privacy policy and the terms all revisited first.

These apply regardless:

Nobody — tutor, pupil, parent or anyone else — records, photographs or screenshots a lesson without our written agreement.
A tutor who records a lesson without authorisation is removed from teaching immediately.

Contact outside lessons

All contact between a tutor and a pupil goes through our channels, and is about the work.
Tutors do not give pupils personal phone numbers, personal email addresses or social media accounts, and do not accept theirs.
Tutors do not connect with pupils, or former pupils under 18, on social media.
Tutors do not meet pupils in person.
Tutors do not contact pupils about anything other than tuition.

The “direct chat with your tutor between lessons” included in all our plans runs through WhatsApp, between the tutor and the parent or carer only, never directly with a pupil. It is a company channel that we can see, and messages are retained.

Starting and ending a lesson

The tutor joins first and admits the pupil.
If a pupil does not join within 20 minutes, the tutor ends the session and reports it to us. This matches the no-show rule in our terms and conditions.
If a pupil joins in obvious distress, or something at home seems wrong, the tutor continues only if it is appropriate, and tells the safeguarding contact the same day.
If anything happens in a lesson that could be misread later — a pupil discloses something, a pupil behaves inappropriately, a sibling or another adult appears on camera — the tutor records what happened and tells the safeguarding contact the same day.

If a pupil discloses something

If a young person tells a tutor something that suggests they are being harmed:

Listen. Let them say it in their own words. Do not interrupt, and do not interrogate.
Do not promise to keep it secret. Say honestly that you may need to tell someone whose job it is to help, and that you will tell them who.
Do not investigate. It is not the tutor’s job and it can make things worse later.
Do not confront anyone, including a parent.
Write it down as soon as the lesson ends, in the young person’s own words as far as possible, with the date and time.
Tell the safeguarding contact the same day. If a child is in immediate danger, call 999 first.

How to raise a concern

Anyone can raise a safeguarding concern with us — a parent, a pupil, a tutor, a teacher, a relative, or a member of the public.

Contact us at safeguarding@toptutorsscotland.co.uk and mark the message for the safeguarding contact.

You do not need to be certain. You do not need evidence. If something does not feel right, tell us and let us work out what to do. It is not your job to decide whether a child is at risk; it is your job to pass on the worry.

Concerns about a tutor, about another pupil, or about something at home are all covered.

What happens next

Same day: the safeguarding contact records the concern and decides whether the child is in immediate danger. If they are, we call the police straight away.
Within one working day: the safeguarding contact decides whether to refer the concern on to the police or the local council’s social work service.
We tell the parent, unless doing so would put the child at greater risk, or the police or social work tell us not to.
If the concern is about a tutor, that tutor stops teaching immediately while it is looked at. That is not a finding against them; it is a precaution.
We keep a written record of what was reported, what we decided, why, and what we did.
We tell you what happened, as far as we properly can. Sometimes we cannot share details, and we will say so rather than go quiet.

We will not decide whether abuse has taken place. That is for the police and social work. Our job is to recognise it, record it, and pass it to the people whose job it is.

Going outside the company

You do not have to come to us first, and you do not have to accept our answer.

If you are worried about a child and you would rather not tell us, or you have told us and you are not satisfied with what we did, contact any of these directly:

Police Scotland — 999 in an emergency, 101 otherwise
The child’s local council social work service, including its out-of-hours emergency team
The child’s school, which has its own designated child protection contact
Disclosure Scotland, if the concern is that someone is unsuitable to work with children
Childline on 0800 1111, if you are a young person
Parentline Scotland (Children 1st) on 08000 28 22 33

If the concern is about our safeguarding contact, or about the founder, go straight to the police or social work. Do not route it through us.

Allegations against a tutor

If an allegation is made about someone working for us:

they stop teaching immediately
we refer it to the police or social work, as appropriate — we do not decide first whether it has substance
we do not investigate it ourselves in a way that could interfere with theirs
we cooperate fully
where we remove someone from regulated work because they harmed a child or put one at risk, we refer them to Disclosure Scotland, as the law requires
we tell the parents of the pupils involved what we properly can

A tutor who is cleared returns to teaching. A tutor who is not does not work for us again.

Lower-level concerns

Not everything is an allegation. Sometimes a tutor does something that is not abuse but is not right either: messaging a pupil from a personal account, a lesson from a bedroom, language that is too familiar, a boundary drifting.

We want those raised too, early, when they can still be corrected with a conversation. We record them, because a pattern of small things matters. Raising one in good faith never counts against the person who raises it.

Records and confidentiality

Safeguarding records are kept securely, separately from ordinary pupil records, and access is limited to the people authorised by the company to handle safeguarding concerns.

We share them only with people who need them to protect a child — police, social work, or another agency.

We keep safeguarding records until at least the pupil’s 25th birthday. At that point we review whether there is a legal, regulatory or safeguarding reason to keep them longer. We do not destroy a record that is subject to a legal hold, an inquiry preservation notice or an ongoing police, social-work or regulatory process.

We do not need consent to record or share a safeguarding concern, and we will not ask for it. Asking could put a child at greater risk. Our privacy policy sets out the legal basis.

Speaking up

Anyone working with us who raises a genuine safeguarding concern is protected. It will never affect whether we give someone work, and it will never be held against them, even if the concern turns out to be mistaken.

Someone who suppresses a concern, or discourages someone else from raising one, will stop working with us.

Reviewing this policy

The safeguarding contact reviews this policy at least once a year, and straight away after any incident or any change to national guidance.

Next review due: 21 August 2027