Safeguarding Is Governance: Why Child Protection Belongs at Board Level

USA Gymnastics had a safeguarding policy. It had reporting procedures. It had staff responsible for athlete welfare. Larry Nassar abused athletes for over two decades anyway.

British football had safeguarding policies too. So did Australian gymnastics. So did every organisation where systemic abuse was later uncovered. The policies existed. The reporting channels existed on paper. What failed was governance.

This is the point that most sport organisations still miss. Safeguarding is not a compliance exercise. It is a governance issue. And until boards treat it that way, the policies are just decoration.

Safeguarding as governance risk

The Good Governance in Grassroots Sport project - developed by ISCA and Transparency International Germany - includes a risk framework with four categories: finance, integrity of decision-making, health and wellbeing, and integrity of competition.

Under health, wellbeing and security, the framework lists sexual harassment alongside injuries, eating disorders, and accidents. It does not treat it as an outlier or a special case. It sits in the same risk category as a player breaking an ankle or a volunteer having a heart attack during a match.

That framing is deliberate. Safeguarding risks arise from the same structural conditions as other organisational risks: power imbalances, insufficient oversight, unclear reporting lines, and cultures where raising concerns is discouraged. These are governance conditions. They are created by governance decisions - or by the absence of them.

When a board delegates safeguarding entirely to an operational officer and never asks about it again, that is a governance decision. When a board does not include safeguarding on its regular agenda, that is a governance decision. When a board does not know whether its clubs have current safeguarding policies, that is a governance failure.

The pattern in every scandal

I have read the investigation reports from the major safeguarding failures in sport over the past decade. The details differ. The structural failures are identical.

Information did not reach the board. Concerns were raised at operational level - to coaches, to welfare officers, to administrators. Some were investigated. Some were dismissed. Some were actively suppressed. But the board, the body with ultimate accountability, either did not know or was not told in terms that demanded action.

The board treated safeguarding as someone else's job. There was a safeguarding officer. There was a welfare policy. The board had ticked the compliance box and moved on to facilities, finances, and competitions - the things boards are comfortable discussing.

Culture overrode procedure. The reporting channels existed on paper. But the culture - the real culture, not the stated values - discouraged their use. Raising a concern about a successful coach was career-ending. Questioning a powerful administrator was political suicide. The procedures were there. The environment to use them was not.

Nobody asked the uncomfortable questions. A board that regularly asks "what safeguarding concerns have been raised this quarter?" creates a culture where reporting is expected. A board that never asks creates a culture where silence is normal.

The NSPCC Child Protection in Sport Unit has been pushing for years to change this pattern. Their position is clear: safeguarding must be a standing board agenda item. Not an annual report from a subcommittee. A regular, substantive discussion at the highest level of governance.

What board-level safeguarding looks like

Sport England's Code for Sports Governance requires that funded organisations demonstrate effective safeguarding governance. UK Sport's framework has similar requirements. These are not suggestions. For organisations that receive public funding, safeguarding governance at board level is a condition of that funding.

But what does it actually mean in practice? Five things.

A named board-level safeguarding lead. Not the same person as the operational safeguarding officer. A board member whose explicit responsibility is to ensure safeguarding governance is effective. They champion safeguarding at board level, they have a direct relationship with the operational officer, and they report to the board on safeguarding matters. This dual structure - operational officer for day-to-day management, board lead for governance oversight - is what prevents safeguarding from disappearing into an operational silo.

Regular board reporting on safeguarding. Not just incidents. Compliance status: are all coaches and volunteers checked? Are policies current? Has the safeguarding officer completed their training refresh? Activity data: how many concerns were raised this quarter, what was their nature, what was the outcome? Trend analysis: are we seeing more concerns or fewer? Are certain programmes or venues generating more reports? This reporting should happen at every board meeting, not annually.

The board reviewing its own culture. Does the board create an environment where a safeguarding concern about a senior figure - a head coach, a long-serving administrator, a major donor - would be taken as seriously as a concern about a junior volunteer? Honest answer. Because the investigation reports consistently show that concerns about powerful people are the ones most likely to be minimised, delayed, or suppressed.

Policy review with teeth. The safeguarding policy should not be a document that is adopted once and filed. The board should review it annually - not just confirm it exists, but examine whether it reflects current practice, current legislation, and current understanding of risk. Has the law changed? Have new risks emerged? Have previous incidents revealed gaps?

Visible consequences for non-compliance. If a coach has not completed their safeguarding training, they do not coach. If a club has not adopted the federation's safeguarding policy, their affiliation is conditional. If a board member has not completed a DBS check or Working With Children verification, they do not serve. These consequences must be automatic and non-negotiable. The moment exceptions are made for important people, the policy becomes advisory.

The federation challenge

All of this is hard enough within a single organisation. In federated sport, it multiplies.

A national governing body is accountable for safeguarding across its entire sport. But in a federated structure, the clubs are independently constituted. They set their own policies, recruit their own volunteers, run their own programmes. The national body can mandate safeguarding standards through its affiliation requirements. But between annual affiliation renewals, it often has no idea whether those standards are being maintained.

Does the national body know which clubs have a current safeguarding policy? Which clubs have a trained safeguarding officer? Which clubs have ensured that all coaches and volunteers working with children have completed the required background checks? Which clubs have had safeguarding concerns raised, and whether those concerns were handled appropriately?

In most federations I have worked with, the honest answer is no. They find out at affiliation time - once a year - when clubs submit paperwork. And the paperwork says what the club wants it to say.

This is not a technology problem at its core. It is a governance problem. But technology is part of the answer.

We built TidyConnect to give federations real visibility across their networks. For safeguarding specifically, that means a federation can see - in real time, not once a year - which clubs have adopted the current safeguarding policy, which clubs have a registered safeguarding officer with current training, which clubs have completed their volunteer screening requirements, and which clubs are overdue on any of these.

This is not surveillance. It is governance infrastructure. The federation is not looking at individual DBS check results or reading incident reports from clubs. It is seeing compliance status - a dashboard that shows green where things are current and red where they are not. The club retains its autonomy over its own safeguarding processes. The federation gets the visibility it needs to fulfil its accountability.

The ISCA position on prevention

The ISCA guidelines emphasise the need for "appropriate prevention measures" across all risk categories. For safeguarding, prevention means something specific and uncomfortable: it means accepting that abuse can happen in your organisation.

Not that it will. That it can.

This distinction matters because most boards approach safeguarding defensively. "We do not have a safeguarding problem." That may be true. But "we do not have a safeguarding problem" and "we have created the conditions where safeguarding concerns would surface if they existed" are two very different statements. The first is a claim. The second is a governance achievement.

Mihai Androhovic of the Romanian Sport for All Association, who contributed to the ISCA project, argued that governance is ultimately "action taken by members." Safeguarding governance is no different. It is not the policy document. It is the action: the board member who asks the difficult question, the welfare officer who escalates a concern even when the subject is a popular coach, the federation that follows up when a club's safeguarding compliance lapses.

Start at the next board meeting

Put safeguarding on the agenda. Not at the end, after the financial report and the competition calendar, when half the board has mentally checked out. In the first half. As a standing item.

Ask the operational safeguarding officer to present a status report. How many coaches and volunteers require background checks? How many are current? How many are overdue? When was the safeguarding policy last reviewed? Have any concerns been raised since the last board meeting?

If you do not have a named board-level safeguarding lead, appoint one. It should be someone who takes it seriously - not the newest member who gets landed with it because nobody else wants the portfolio.

And ask yourself the hard question. If a young person in your organisation disclosed abuse by a senior figure tomorrow, would your current structures ensure that disclosure was heard, believed, and acted on? If you are not certain the answer is yes, you have governance work to do.

Because the policies were never the problem. The governance was.

References

• ISCA & Transparency International Germany. Guidelines for Good Governance in Grassroots Sport (PDF). Chapter 6: Health and Safety.
• NSPCC. Child Protection in Sport Unit. Safeguarding governance.
• Sport England & UK Sport. A Code for Sports Governance. Welfare Director requirements.
• UK Sport. UK Sport. Safeguarding requirements.
• Sport Integrity Australia. Sport Integrity Australia. Child safe sport standards.
• Sport Resolutions. Sport Resolutions. Safeguarding investigations.