safeguarding
what’s in place, and what isn’t.
Last updated 3 September 2026. isjamesok? is a charity in formation. Most safeguarding pages describe a policy. This one mostly describes the absence of one, because that is the true state of it today, and a safeguarding page that overstates itself is worse than no page at all.
if someone is at risk right now, do not use this page
Nothing here is monitored out of hours, and nobody here is trained to take a disclosure. Please use one of these instead.
Someone is in immediate danger, or a crime is happening — 999.
You’re worried about a child — contact children’s social care at the council where the child lives. Every council has an out-of-hours emergency duty team. The NSPCC helpline, 0808 800 5000, will also take a concern from an adult and pass it on.
You’re worried about an adult at risk — contact adult social care at the council where they live, and ask to make a safeguarding referral.
You’re worried about an adult who works with children — contact that council’s Local Authority Designated Officer (LADO).
Someone is in mental health crisis — the numbers in are staffed, at every hour, by people trained for exactly this.
what this organisation is, and is not
isjamesok? is not a crisis service, a helpline, a therapy provider or a referral service, and nothing on this website is medical advice. We do not take disclosures through this site, our email, or our social accounts. There is no duty rota, no clinician on call, and no out-of-hours cover.
What we do is publish a method for asking someone how they are, and a map of the evidence underneath it. That is the whole of the current activity.
what is not in place yet
Plainly, so that nobody relies on something that does not exist:
- No safeguarding policy has been adopted. There is no trustee board yet to adopt one.
- There is no designated safeguarding lead, and no deputy.
- No DBS process is running, because nobody is yet in a role that would require a check.
- There is no registered charity number, no insurance, and no complaints procedure with an independent stage.
- Nobody has been trained. No safer-recruitment process exists.
Until earlier versions of this site said otherwise, the footer claimed a policy, DBS checks and named leads already existed. That was wrong, and it has been corrected. Getting our own claims right is the thing this charity says it is for, so it should not have needed correcting.
the rule that follows from that
No session, workshop, group or one-to-one contact with a child, or with an adult at risk, happens before all of the following are true. Not one of them arrives afterwards.
- A safeguarding policy adopted and minuted by a trustee board that includes people who can outvote the founder.
- A named designated safeguarding lead and a named deputy, both trained, both reachable, both published here.
- Enhanced DBS and barred-list checks for anyone in regulated activity, through a safer-recruitment process rather than an introduction. From 1 September 2026 the supervision exemption for volunteers no longer applies, and we are not looking for a way around that.
- A written route for every concern to reach a statutory service that is under a duty to receive it — and evidence that the service on the other end has agreed to it.
- Insurance, and a complaints procedure that does not end with us.
One governing sentence sits over all of it, and it is the same one the evidence map already commits to: we never hold a risk we cannot route. In a school, the school’s designated safeguarding lead owns every decision about a pupil, and a visiting charity acquires no parallel duty and no right to second-guess them. The full reasoning, including where it is still unresolved, is in the evidence map — including the adult side, where the Care Act’s section 42 test means many of the men this charity exists for will not meet the threshold for a statutory enquiry at all. We have not solved that. We have written down that we have not solved it.
raising a concern about us
If something we have published, said or done worries you — a line that could cause harm, a piece of advice that is wrong, the conduct of anyone connected with isjamesok? — email safeguarding@isjamesok.org.
What that is: a monitored inbox, read in working hours, UK time. What it is not: an emergency route, an out-of-hours service, or a place to disclose something about yourself or a third party that needs acting on today. Use the routes at the top of this page for that.
If the concern is about the founder, or you would rather not go to us at all, you can raise it directly with the Charity Commission, at gov.uk/complain-about-charity. You do not need our permission and you do not need to tell us first.
how we write about suicide
We follow the Samaritans media guidelines for reporting suicide, everywhere — the site, the evidence map, social accounts, and anything we hand to a journalist. That means no method, no location, no framing of a death as inevitable or as a solution, and a route to help alongside anything that discusses risk. If you think we have got a line wrong, tell us and we will change it.
when this page changes
Each item under “what is not in place yet” moves to a dated entry above it as it becomes true, rather than quietly disappearing. If this page still says the same thing in a year, that is information too.