Keeping children safe.Keeping children safe.

Safeguarding at Tipu is the job of our Designated Safeguarding Lead, Christian Hehir, with Ethan Baxter as deputy when they are away. If you are worried about a child we teach, whether it’s about a lesson, a tutor or something at home, email contact@tipu-learn.com with “Safeguarding” as the subject, and it will reach them.

Email is not watched around the clock. If a child is in danger now, call 999 first and tell us afterwards. If you are an adult who wants advice about a child, the NSPCC helpline is on 0808 800 5000 or at nspcc.org.uk.

The safeguarding lead reads it, and if they need to know more, they ask you. They then decide what to do, which may be:

• calling the police if a child is in danger
• passing it to the local council’s children’s services, or to the council officer who deals with concerns about adults who work with children
• talking with the family and the tutor, and keeping an eye on things, when it is less serious

We tell parents what we are doing, unless telling them could put the child at more risk. We share only what the people helping the child need to know.

If the concern is about a tutor, they stop teaching while it is looked into. Straight away, they can no longer see the child’s lesson links or records on Tipu, and we move the child’s lessons to a new lesson room. If we remove a tutor because they may have harmed a child, we tell the Disclosure and Barring Service, as the law requires.

We write down every concern and what we did about it. Those records are kept apart from lesson notes and reports, and only the people who need to see them can.

Lessons happen on Microsoft Teams, in a room made just for your child’s lessons. The link to join is in your child’s own login, not on your account, so they join from their own Tipu. If they use your device, open their login with Switch account and they join from there; we email them when you do.

The tutor always has their camera on, in a quiet room with nothing personal in view. Your child can choose whether to turn theirs on. We suggest they sit in a shared room rather than a bedroom, with an adult somewhere nearby.

Nobody records a lesson: not the tutor, not your child and not us.

Outside lessons, tutors talk to your child only on Tipu’s own pages, such as homework and reports, or in your family’s WhatsApp group, which always includes a parent and our office. Never one-to-one, and never from a personal account: no personal email, phone, text, social media or meeting in person. If a tutor ever does, please tell us.

We require every tutor to have an enhanced DBS check, including a check of the children’s barred list, before they teach, and to keep it up to date. We keep the date and level of each check, and whether it is on the DBS Update Service, not the certificate itself.

Don’t write a concern in a lesson report, an internal note or your notepad. Email it to the safeguarding lead the same day, with what you saw or heard, in the child’s own words where you can, and when it happened. If a child is in danger now, call 999 first.