Session 4 Understanding risk

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Understanding risks. A female skiing coach and a young female snowboarder are stood either side of a large graphic scale. The scale is semi-circular and is segmented green through shades of amber to red. The green is labelled low. The red is labelled high. The pointer on the scale is positioned in the middle of the green segment.

In this session, you will explore how to identify, prevent, and minimise safeguarding risks. You will also consider the main parts of a safer recruitment process and how this can help manage risk. The final part explores how risks in the ‘digital’ world can be minimised.

Learning outcomes

By the end of this session, you will have a better understanding of:

How assessing and managing risk is an important preventative measure in safeguarding.

Risk factors within your organisation, by identifying all the ways in which children and vulnerable adults are involved in your sport.

The benefits and main parts of a safer recruitment process.

Risks in the digital world.

Although safeguarding is there to protect everyone, it is often helpful to think about children as they can be more vulnerable.

By answering the question of where children are involved in your organisation, you can start to identify and minimise the risks anyone can face.

This is the first step towards developing a comprehensive safeguarding approach. Let’s think about how and where children are involved.

You might find it surprising just how many diverse circumstances exist.

Each situation carries safeguarding risks when it comes to interactions or involvement with children. Some of these are common to every situation – for example, risks posed by people who may wish to abuse children, or the potential for poor equipment or facilities to harm children.

Identifying these risks will help you understand where action is needed.

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Several sheets of official-looking paper are at the centre. There are lines of text and a series of tick marks. Around this are eight characters representing people involved in sports, along with some green ticks and amber question marks.

A safeguarding risk assessment helps you to identify and introduce arrangements needed to reduce the chances of abuse occurring. They are an important preventative tool.

The person who completes a risk assessment needs in-depth knowledge of:

• The local context and the organisation.
• The specific activity or activities.
• The potential safeguarding risks that can arise within sport.

A safeguarding risk assessment should not be a one-time activity. Risk assessment is an ongoing process that helps to:

• Identify ways or circumstances in which children and others may be abused.
• Develop a plan to remove or reduce the risk.
• Monitor the mitigation of these risks (ideally) until they are eliminated.

Organisational risk assessments should be reviewed and updated regularly (at least once a year), whereas activity level risk assessments should be completed before each activity or event and then reassessed afterwards for learning.

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The inside of a residential camp bedroom. A bed with bedding, A side table with a lamp and some books on it. Outside, through the bedroom window, a group of athletes are moving towards their coach. One of them is in a wheelchair.

Everyone involved in sport has a responsibility to think about how the activities they are involved in might present a safeguarding risk, and to act to minimise any risks that are identified.

This exercise shows how your organisation can begin to record where safeguarding measures are needed or need to be strengthened. Over time your organisation’s safeguarding policy and procedures will help you cover all these different situations in a systematic way.

Why is identifying risks an important step?

A comprehensive approach to safeguarding means putting in place a range of measures to address and minimise all risks. Identifying and managing risks helps to prevent harm.

In addition to identifying risk, another important step is understanding what safeguards already exist in your organisation – and one part of this is how people are recruited.

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A group of four adults are sitting around an office table having a discussion. There are several sheets of printed paper in front of them on the table.

There are a number of actions an organisation can take to mitigate the risks identified in the previous section. We think one measure, safer recruitment, is worthy of particular attention.

What is meant by safer recruitment?

Sport relies on thousands of well-motivated staff and volunteers. Without them, many sports organisations, activities, and events would not exist.

In order to attract the right staff and volunteers, it is essential that organisations have effective recruitment and selection procedures.

Safer recruitment refers to processes that organisations can put into place to prevent or deter unsuitable individuals from taking up roles that provide access to potential victims. It is a way to make sure that people have the right skills, knowledge and attitude for the role(s) you are looking to recruit them for.

Safer recruitment is one of the core safeguarding building blocks – and protects the gateway to your organisation. The same procedures should be adopted whether staff are paid or unpaid, full time or part time.

Prevent people who wish to harm children from getting into your organisation. It is much better – and easier – to use a safer recruitment process to prevent an unsuitable person getting into your organisation than it is to remove them once concerns arise.

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Four groups of people involved in sports. Each group is drawn inside a speech bubble. Golfers. Officials. Referees. Coaches. In the middle of the speech bubbles are three sheets of documents or forms with a tick on them. Also on the graphic are some green ticks and some question marks.

As a minimum, safer recruitment should include:

• Providing a job description, which details all the tasks involved in the role, including any responsibility for children.
• Undertaking an interview, including questions to assess candidate suitability, previous work with, and attitudes towards children.
• Taking up references from previous employers or people who know the candidate well, including speaking to them directly to verify the reference.
• Obtaining a police or criminal records check (where this is available) and a ‘self-declaration’ – where you ask the candidate to state and sign whether they have been involved in any safeguarding incidents in the past.
• Induction when they start in the role to make sure they understand safeguarding policy and procedures.
• Having privacy notices in place for dealing with processing sensitive personal data, like criminal convictions, in an application.

Gather and assess all candidate information

All relevant information (from the application form, interview, references, and police checks) should be collated and assessed by someone with good safeguarding knowledge. This is what is meant by ‘screening’.

All information about the candidate and the interview should be recorded and stored safely until either a decision is made not to hire the candidate, or the employment is terminated.

Beyond recruitment, a further set of risks occurs online. In the next section, you will begin to identify the risks associated with the digital world.

The digital world refers to ways that individuals and organisations communicate and interact using electronic and online technologies. Digital activities include receiving and/or posting information, photographs and videos, as well as communicating with other people or groups through written messages or live audio or video chat.

Digital (or ‘online’) activity involves the use of mobile phones, computers, tablets, or other internet-enabled devices. It includes using social media platforms, websites, video conferencing solutions, and messaging apps. Some online games also enable players to interact with each other and share messages.

Let’s think about some common examples of digital activities. Select each tile to reveal the type of interaction.

There are a number of safeguarding risks that exist across these different platforms which you need to be aware of. You are asked to think about some of these next.

All these experiences are potentially emotionally damaging and can impact an individual negatively. Just like abuse that happens face to face, online abusers could be other children or adults who are known to the victim, or strangers.

People can experience serious abuse online without ever meeting the person abusing them face to face. The impact and trauma experienced by those targeted and abused online is as devastating as for any form of offline bullying.

Next, you are going to think about how the use and misuse of images in sport can create the risk of abuse.

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A young snowboarder is performing a somersault. A female photographer is taking shots of the action.

Images and videos of children and adults in sport play an important, legitimate, and positive role: for parents who want to record their children’s successes; for coaches who may want to use them to improve the teams’ performance; and for organisations that want to promote and celebrate their programmes and activities.

However, images like these can be shared very easily, and can be misused, so care needs to be taken to avoid potential safeguarding concerns. In particular, consent must be obtained from the subject of any photo, and if the subject is a child, their parents/guardians should also give consent.

In this section, you will think about safeguarding considerations in producing, using, and storing images (photographs and videos), particularly of children.

What are the main risks in sharing players’ images?

Click on each statement below to read more information.

It is important to note that anyone connected with your sport may ‘overshare’ images – parents, and even children themselves, can overshare without realising the risks.

Responding to concerns about photography

All staff, volunteers, children, and parents should be informed about the potential risks of sharing visual content and that they should report to the organisation if they have any concerns regarding visual content. There must be a procedure in place to ensure that reported concerns are dealt with in the same way as any other safeguarding issue.

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A young female person shouting into a megaphone.

Congratulations, you are now halfway through this course. There are many important and interesting topics ahead.

The main learning and messages from this session are:

Your role in preventing and minimising harm in your sport starts with an assessment of risk. The first key step in this process is to map out all the ways in which your organisation engages with children and identify the types of safeguarding risks associated with these activities, environments, and the roles of the people involved. Safer recruitment is one important way of managing risk by preventing unsuitable people getting into your organisation. The minimum recruitment risk reduction measures in safer recruitment are: providing a job description; undertaking interviews; taking up references; and obtaining a police/criminal record check and a self-declaration. Risks also occur in the digital world through cyber-bullying or when individuals misuse personal information to humiliate or use the online environment to groom people. Misleading information can also be provided online that may lead to harm.

In the next session, you will cover policies, procedures, and codes of conduct and their key role in safeguarding.

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Four officials. Referee, coach, umpire, team official. Each one is inside a circle. Between the circles is a box with the word quiz inside it, along with a green tick and a red cross.

Now it’s time to complete Course quiz 1 – it’s a great way to check your understanding of the course content so far.

This quiz contains 16 questions and a pass mark of 70% and above is required to obtain your digital badge and course certificate.

You can review the answers you gave, and which were correct/incorrect, after each attempt has been completed.

If you don’t pass the quiz at the first attempt, you are allowed as many attempts as you need to pass. There is a 24-hour delay between each attempt to allow you time to look back at the course content again.

Now go to the Quiz.