COMMUNITY SPORT
says Slinn. “What’s involved if you’re on public land rather than in a private club or on a school site? When we started looking into it, there were safeguarding issues around public insurances, around people drinking, around dogs faeces. So we ask ourselves, can we write some guidance on that? How can we test it? How can we promote it? Most of what we’re dealing with is pretty practical stuff.” As for the progress made, different
NGBs face different challenges. “If you’re the Football Association and you’ve got 50,000 junior clubs, consistency is a long-term piece of work,” points out Slinn. “On the other hand, if you’re a tiny NGB which doesn’t have many resources, you may not have the money to progress your safeguarding strategy." At grassroots level, one way clubs in
England might meet the expectations of their CSP or NGB is by participating in Sport England’s Clubmark scheme, for which the CPSU is the safeguarding advisor. Most recently, the CPSU has widened its net even further by striking up a partnership with Quest, Sport England’s quality scheme for sport and leisure. “Right Directions, the organisation that
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The Amateur Swimming Association is one of the NGBs to have received praise for its actions towards safeguarding children in sport
manages Quest, contacted us through Sport England because they realised that although there was some reference to safeguarding children in their existing modules, there was scope to have a specific module dedicated entirely to this issue,” says Slinn. “Since then, we’ve worked with them to develop an optional safeguarding module for sports development teams and leisure facilities undergoing Quest assessments. We suspect that will grow legs as people see the benefit of it.
BEST PRACTICE To date, all 49 CSPs in England and 40 of the 46 Sport England-funded NGBs have met the CPSU standards. Each is now working on a post-standards framework to embed and maintain the standards, while the Youth Sport Trust and 18 of UK Sport’s funded NGBs and support organisations have started the standards process. Slinn and Tiivas are also keen to point out
the numerous examples of best practice highlighted by the Initiative. These range from the success with which some CSPs are now collaborating with the statutory sector to coaching agencies set up by others. The latter involves the
CSP collating a database of appropriately qualified and trustworthy coaches that schools in the local area can draw on. Several of the NGBs, meanwhile, have set up youth forums. “The Rugby League Youth Forum, in particular, is terrific,” says Slinn. “They’re currently involved with a sexual abuse prevention programme which is about prevention in general, not just prevention in sport." Tiivas gives credit to the Amateur
Swimming Association: “They’ve had a lot of issues in this area over the years and they need to be constantly vigilant, but they've also been very open all the way through, contributing to some very important early research.” The ultimate goal, she explains, “is to
create real ownership across the sector of what needs to be done to keep children safe, so it doesn’t matter where a child participates, in what sport and at what level: the safeguards will be the same.” l
sportsmanagement.co.uk issue 3 2014 © Cybertrek 2014
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