Answers to some of your questions ...

The OHOV team are based in the Scottish Children’s Reporter Administration (SCRA) office in Stirling. The children and young people’s board will have direct links with a group of decision makers who work in the different organisations that run the Children’s Hearings System in Scotland. This group is called the Children’s Hearing Improvement Partnership (CHIP). Two of the organisations we will work closely with are Children’s Hearings Scotland (CHS) – they are the organisation who recruit the panel members and the Scottish Children’s Reporter Administration (SCRA) – who manage the Hearings Centres and the Reporters for The Hearings System. The Scottish Government funds Our Hearings, Our Voice. 

You can apply all year round.

This would depend mostly on your age, and your experience of travelling. The OHOV Board is for children and young people aged between 8-18 years old and who live anywhere in Scotland. Each board meeting will be held in a different place to make sure that it’s fair for all board members to travel to. Sometimes a board meeting will be close to where you live, while other ones might be quite far away. You might be very young, or you might not have experience of travelling on your own, or to different places. If you have far to travel (let’s say you lived in Fife and a Board meeting is Inverness) then you might need to stay overnight in accommodation (which we would pay for), so you might need to have someone with you. 

We would help you settle in and get to know the other young people on the board through team building activities and games. We will support you to work as a group to decide what the Board’s priorities are and how we will communicate what we are doing. Everything we do will be with one aim – to see the Children’s Hearings System improve for children and young people in Scotland.

Commissions are short term projects that you can chose to get involved in. Examples of these could be – training panel members or Safeguarders, taking part in an event or meeting decision makers to tell them what you think, creating a new leaflet or game to help children and young people understand Hearings or any number of other things. You will set the priorities for the work of the Board.  There are lots of adults and organisations who might want to ask you what you think about things they are doing. They will get in touch with the OHOV Team and see if the board members want to be involved. 

We want everyone to have a fair chance to get involved with OHOV. We are looking for a Board that includes children and young people across the age range of 8-18, from different parts of Scotland and who are passionate about things changing within the Hearings System. The OHOV Team will make decisions based on all parts of the application – so what you put in your form about why you want to be involved, getting involved on the recruitment event and the information on your reference from an adult who knows you well.