Answers to some of your questions ...

The OHOV team are based in the Scottish Children’s Reporter Administration (SCRA) office in Glasgow. 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. 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.

You can apply all year round.

This depends mostly on your age, and your experience of travelling. The OHOV Board is for children and young people aged between 8-21 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. 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.