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What Sport Can Teach Every Setting About Safeguarding Culture
Safeguarding has come a long way in sport. National governing bodies set clear expectations, clubs run DBS checks and training, and welfare officers exist at grassroots level in a way that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. And yet, according to barrister and safeguarding specialist Antonia Noble, speaking on the latest episode of the CPOMS podcast, Safeguarding in Sport: Protecting Young Athletes from Grassroots to Elite Levels, there is still a blind spot sitting underneath all that progress: the quiet belief that abuse “won’t happen here.”
It’s a phrase that will be familiar to anyone working in education too. Policies, training and paperwork can all be in place, and the risk can still be underestimated, because not everyone has fully internalised that it could happen in their setting, to their pupils, on their watch. As Antonia puts it plainly:
“Safeguarding is really everybody looking out for everybody else in the most gentle, normal way as we all would do. So, for me, it’s all about what’s in your heart. You can have all the paperwork in the world, but the culture cannot do that. That what happens in your heart, that’s what the fundamental safeguarding is for me. Does it happen here? Does everyone care enough?”
That question, “does it happen here, does everyone care?” is a useful gut-check for any DSL, welfare officer or club administrator, in sport or in education.
Volunteers, time and the limits of good intentions
One of the reasons this blind spot persists in sport isn’t a lack of knowledge. Most volunteer-run clubs know their policies. What they often lack is time and capacity fully to live them. That’s a familiar tension in schools too, wherever safeguarding responsibility rests with people who are also doing several other jobs at once; PTAs, extracurricular clubs, sports partnerships and stretched pastoral teams.
The practical lesson here isn’t “try harder.” It’s about designing safeguarding processes that are as low-friction as possible, so that good practice doesn’t quietly depend on whoever happens to have spare capacity that week. If a process only works when someone has extra time, it isn’t a resilient process – it’s a hope.
The scale of the challenge, from grassroots to elite
Antonia’s description of the sheer breadth of what safeguarding in professional sport actually covers is a striking reminder of how far the responsibility extends once you move beyond the obvious:
“But the breadth of safeguarding or keeping kids safe in sports clubs, grassroots, yes, but in the professional game is absolutely extraordinary. It is jaw dropping from match days, from kids being involved in coming in into grounds by their self under sixteens. Can they be searched? Are they drunk? All of those things. What happens in the hospitality suites? What happens in the changing rooms when you’ve got a player that’s seventeen and the rest of them are eighteen or over? What do you do with host families? What do you do on away trips when everybody’s gone off to Portugal for the pre season?”
Away trips, changing rooms, host families, hospitality suites. None of these sit neatly inside a single policy document. They demand judgement, relationships and a culture of noticing. The same is true in education: the moments that matter most for safeguarding rarely happen in the classroom under direct supervision. They happen on trips, in transitions between settings and in the gaps between adults.
Equipping children to protect themselves
Given how much of a young person’s life happens outside adult supervision, Antonia is direct about where the first line of defence sits:
“For me, it’s the first line, isn’t it? If you can allow and enable children to keep themselves safe, that’s the first protocol and then the rest of it we can support with. But unfortunately, at three o’clock in the morning, nobody’s gonna be in a bedroom with a child with a mobile phone. So, for me, it is also about equipping kids with the tools to keep themselves safe.”
This isn’t a case for stepping back from adult responsibility, it’s the opposite. Genuine child empowerment is a safeguarding control in its own right, sitting alongside good policy and vigilant adults, not instead of them. For schools, that raises a practical question worth asking regularly: are pupils actually given age-appropriate tools to recognise and respond to unsafe situations themselves, or is that assumed to happen elsewhere?
Education isn’t as far ahead as it might think
It would be easy for education leaders to hear all this and assume sport is the sector still catching up. Sam Eustace, Senior Product Manager at CPOMS, who interviews Antonia suggests it’s more complicated than that:
“I would argue education still isn’t there embracing the message in keeping children safe that it could happen here. You know that fundamental line in keeping children safe is drilled into people year in, year out and there’s still occasions where people think that their setting or their system or where they’re at isn’t the place where that thing occurs. But in the online world, there’s no boundaries.”
It’s a fair challenge. The online world doesn’t respect the boundary between school gates and home life, or between term time and holidays, or between a club and a classroom. Which brings the conversation to what might be the single most practical safeguarding lever available to any setting.
Record-keeping: the unglamorous habit that keeps coming up in serious case reviews
Asked for one piece of advice she’d give to anyone working in safeguarding, Antonia didn’t hesitate:
“We’ve all seen the serious case reviews, haven’t we? We know that they will tell us about sharing information. And for me, I’m gonna have more than one [piece of advice] but this the first and the most important. It’s about record keeping, it’s about sharing that information because as we’ve discussed all the way through this. Kids are in school. They’re the doctors. They’re at the hospital…we all have a piece of that jigsaw.”
A child’s life is lived across multiple settings in any given week – school, clubs, GP surgery, hospital, home. Each of those settings may hold a piece of the safeguarding picture, but if those pieces aren’t recorded clearly and shared appropriately, nobody ever sees the whole jigsaw. This is the theme that runs through report after report: not a lack of concern, but a lack of joined-up, timely information.
Listening to children and being seen to act on it
The final thread running through the conversation is deceptively simple: listen to children and let them see that you’ve acted on what they’ve told you.
“And we know that we we’ve bumped into quite a lot of grassroots football clubs through the county FA’s…They’re clubs that are talking to their kids and listening to them. And we know that parents want that. They want to drop their kids off somewhere that’s happy and where they’re safe. So, for me it’s about keeping good records at that child protection end of it and really listening to kids so that we can start to change the music.”
Antonia’s description of visiting a professional club’s ground and being asked “are you alright?” by everyone from the person serving tea to people in the boardroom is a good illustration of what this looks like in practice. Safeguarding as something felt in the texture of a place, not just written down in its policies:
“But really what it was about was that every person inside of that club from the people who were serving the tea and coffee to the people in the boardrooms, the academy apprentices, they were all conscious of who you were, and they were all conscious to make sure you were okay. Every door that was open for me, somebody said, are you alright?”
Trust built this way doesn’t just protect children in the moment. It’s what makes them more likely to speak up the next time something feels wrong.
The common thread
Strip away the specifics of sport, and the same three things keep surfacing: a culture that genuinely believes “it could happen here,” record-keeping and information-sharing that treats every setting as one piece of a bigger picture and a habit of listening to children that’s visible enough for them, and their parents, to trust it’s real.
None of that depends on the size of the organisation or the level of the sport. It depends on whether the right information reaches the right person at the right time and whether children feel able to say something in the first place.
That’s exactly the gap CPOMS’ StudentSafe exists to close for schools and settings working with young people day to day. Giving staff a single, secure place to record concerns, spot patterns across time and multiple sources and share information quickly with the professionals who need it, so that no piece of the safeguarding jigsaw gets lost between one setting and the next.
You can book a demo of StudentSafe here.
