Child Protection and Online Safety Policy Statement
Charanga Ltd operate and manage this site on behalf of Greater Manchester Music Hub.
At Charanga, we firmly believe that children and young people should be protected from neglect, abuse and any form of harm. Child protection is a responsibility shared by every individual, organisation, and group within our community and beyond.
We actively collaborate with our stakeholders and stay abreast of relevant legislation, guidance, and best practices to ensure everything we do and the products and services we provide are appropriate for educational settings, including online spaces.
This policy statement – for our users, partner organisations and the wider community – outlines the measures we have in place to ensure the safety and well-being of children in all aspects of our operations.
In terms of child protection, we have identified eight key areas of risk:
- Who can access Charanga
- Online access for students
- Our platform’s messaging function
- UK only – external sharing of students’ work – Yumu Portfolio URLs
- Video and photography – film and images of children and young people
- Data protection and record keeping
- Visits to schools and projects
- Unexpected direct contact from a student
Who can access Charanga
Charanga’s products and services are available to schools and educational organisations on a subscription basis. We do not deliver any services directly to children and young people.
Our licences are only offered to schools, music services, instrumental teachers and selected organisations.
Our products and services are appropriate and designed for schools and educational organisations working within their own safeguarding and child protection guidelines and all relevant legislative frameworks, supporting teachers and young learners in the UK and for our international partners.
We issue free trials and full licences to schools, colleges, youth organisations, and alternative educational organisations (Alternative Providers – AP). We can also issue licences to private or third/voluntary sector organisations with appropriate policies and frameworks in place to support children and young people.
In the UK, schools with a Department for Education (DfE) number or equivalent are governed by national and local government laws and regulations regarding safeguarding and child protection.
We require non-DfE UK schools, independent organisations and charities, and non-UK schools or organisations not covered by an international partnership, to provide detailed information to help us assess and monitor applications for a Charanga licence. This information is kept on record as an audit log and is subject to annual internal QA checks. It includes, but is not restricted to:
- Full contact details and online profile, any company registration details/registered charity details.
- Confirmation of teaching contexts, including age ranges of students and details of any statutory partnerships and funders.
- Confirmation that organisations meet all relevant national legislative requirements for working with children and young people, including relevant safeguarding and insurance policies and safe recruitment practice.
Online access for students
Providing individual access to Yumu, our password-protected online workspace for children and young people, is an optional feature for all UK licensees and most international partners. Yumu does not allow user-to-user communication, sharing or connection between students.
Charanga has implemented all safeguarding measures possible regarding Yumu. Providing access to Yumu for children and young people by issuing them with login details, monitoring their Yumu activity, enabling/turning off the teacher/student Yumu messaging feature, and deleting/removing student accounts and Student Groups are decisions made by the subscriber, not Charanga.
Making decisions about which resources and assignments to share with children and young people via Yumu is also the subscriber’s responsibility, not Charanga’s. Teachers can choose to share anything they can access on the Charanga platform. Teachers can also upload and share their own teaching resources as long as they have relevant permission/s. (Please refer to our Terms of Use). Because Charanga is a product designed for schools and educational organisations, it is reasonable to assume that any resources uploaded by teachers are suitable and appropriate for the students they are working with.
Children and young people cannot access Yumu without having an account created for them. Accounts can only be created by a teacher or other member of staff with an active Charanga login attached to a school, organisation, or music service with an active licence.
These users are responsible for creating, managing, and deleting their own Student Groups and student Yumu accounts. They can use the Student Group’s management features to give students access to an individual Yumu account by issuing them with a unique username and password.
These users can also:
- Add and remove other teachers from a specific Student Group.
- Use Yumu to share assignments, portfolios and creative tools directly with students.
- See all work saved or uploaded to each student’s Yumu account.
- Change login details to prevent access to an individual Yumu account if needed.
- Edit student’s details (names).
- Remove and add individual students to and from specific Student Groups.
- Delete student Yumu accounts so they no longer have access to Yumu.
- Remove or reassign whole Student Groups.
- Issue an ‘Invite Token’ to students who already have a Yumu login. This enables the student to join additional Student Groups using the same Yumu login.
Students can use their own Yumu login to upload and save work such as image, audio or video files. They can also use their own login to access Yumu from any computer or tablet in or out of school.
Students can only upload content using their own Yumu login.
Students cannot directly share uploaded content with anyone other than the teacher/s who has/have given them access to Yumu.
In Yumu, a pop-up reminder asks students to abide by straightforward rules for uploading content and to ask their teacher for advice if they need clarification. Teachers are responsible for checking that the content their students upload to our platform does not break copyright laws.
Message function
Teachers can switch the Message function on and off using the Options tab in Student Groups.
The default messaging setting is off for all products except Charanga Secondary (UK and International) and YuStudio® (Youth Music Partnership, UK).
Teachers can message an individual student or broadcast a message to all students in a Student Group.
Students cannot message each other using Yumu – they can only message teachers directly.
Students cannot see any messages sent by other students to teachers.
Messages cannot be edited or deleted by students or teachers.
Teachers can view their own teacher–student messages. A lead teacher or administrator at a school can also view all messages between teachers and students in a current academic year. At the time of writing, an interface is being developed, enabling lead teachers and administrators to download a document with all messages between teachers and students in a current academic year.
Charanga stores message history between teachers and students for seven years. This can be retrieved upon request for safeguarding or legal purposes – for example, by a school Designated Safeguarding Lead or Local Authority Designated Officer for Allegations.
Teachers who need to ask for a record of a teacher/school’s message history should contact gdpr@charanga.com.
UK only – external sharing of students’ work – Yumu Portfolio URLs
In the UK, there is functionality for a teacher to share a specific portfolio of work created by a student outside of the Yumu or teacher Charanga login.
At the time of writing, this functionality is solely available for sharing a student’s digital Arts Award portfolio, primarily for online moderation by Trinity College London following teacher assessment.
The teacher’s decision to share a student’s Arts Award portfolio beyond the Charanga platform should reflect their school’s guidelines.
The sharelink (URL) only gives access to work in the Arts Award portfolio, not to students’ login details or other saved work.
The sharelink (URL) can be switched off by the teacher – at which point the portfolio will no longer be viewable by anyone other than the student and their teacher.
Students or teachers cannot edit or amend any work viewed using the sharelink (URL).
Charanga is not responsible for content shared by schools.
Video and photography – film and images of children and young people
Charanga uses images and videos of children and young people to:
- Demonstrate how pupils can use our resources
- Promote our products
- Celebrate musical achievements (schools, teachers and young people)
- Raise awareness of music projects
- Help parents and carers understand the activities that their child/young person is, or has been, involved in
We seek to keep children and young people safe by:
- Always obtaining written consent from a school, or the child and their parents or carers, before taking and using images or films of a child.
- Always explain what the images or videos will be used for, how they will be stored, and the potential risks associated with sharing photos of children.
- Making it clear that if a child or their school or family withdraw consent for an image to be shared, it may not be possible to delete pictures that have already been shared or published, even if Charanga has deleted stored files and images/recordings published on the Charanga platform.
- Not displaying the names of children whose images appear in our published materials – and only using their first names if we do need to identify them.
- Never publishing personal information about individual children or disclosing any identifying information about them (for example, the child’s name, the school name associated with the child’s name, or the child’s name associated with a school uniform carrying a logo).
- Never passing our images and videos on to third parties without consent.
We also seek to reduce the risk of images being copied and misused by:
- Only using images and film of children in appropriate clothing in educational/professional settings.
- Only using images that positively reflect young people’s involvement in the activity.
We only work with professional photographers or filmmakers with a UK Disclosure and Barring Service Enhanced DBS certificate issued within the last year – or an older Enhanced DBS certificate with an Annual Update subscription, which Charanga can check.
Please contact tonypinkham@charanga.com, Head of Marketing & Communications, if you have any questions about our images and film of children and young people.
Data protection and record keeping
Our designated Data Protection Officer is Marina Dussek.
Charanga is registered with the ICO and is compliant with GDPR (European Union and UK). For more detailed information, refer to Charanga’s GDPR statement, Privacy notice and Terms of Use.
Visits to schools and projects
Charanga team members and affiliated professionals may visit schools or music projects as part of their roles. During such visits, we adhere to the host institution’s safeguarding procedures, ensuring compliance with its guidelines and protocols. Our staff members and contractors are reminded to be vigilant and proactive in identifying and reporting any safeguarding concerns that may arise during their engagements.
Our UK CPD & Training team members visit schools regularly to deliver teacher training, including supervised demonstration lessons and unsupervised walking between school-based classroom venues. All team members are subject to safe recruitment processes, including taking up references and Enhanced DBS checks with Annual Subscription Service (UK Disclosure and Barring Service) and Enhanced DBS checks (Disclosure Scotland).
Unexpected direct contact from a student
We do not offer any direct support to students. However, we recognise that, as a company operating in the education sector and being highly visible on a day-to-day basis in classrooms and safe learning environments, it is always possible – however unlikely – that a child/young person makes direct contact with us because our phone numbers, email addresses, and social media accounts are publicly available.
A student might contact Charanga seeking technical support related to Yumu, or a vulnerable student might contact Charanga seeking a safe adult to ask for advice.
Members of the team who may be exposed to unexpected direct contact from students include, but are not limited to:
- anyone who answers the help and information phone lines and emails
- anyone who manages and monitors social media
All team members are given detailed information regarding managing direct contact with a child, which must be logged and reported to one of the company Designated Safeguarding Leads.
For further information or assistance regarding our safeguarding policies, please contact our Designated Safeguarding Leads: