3.6 Reviewing other policies and procedures

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Two athletics officials stand either side of a giant clipboard. The paper on the clipboard is headed our policies, with lines of text and two green ticks below the heading.

One of your early tasks is to review all your organisation’s policies and procedures that may be relevant to safeguarding – to check that they reference and will address the broad range of safeguarding issues. This could also include guidance, rules, or regulations specific to your sport or organisation that are relevant to safeguarding.

Once you understand how these policies can be relevant to safeguarding, you can identify gaps or parts that need to be strengthened and add this to your safeguarding Action Plan. But which policies, procedures and processes should you review?

Here are the most common ones:

• Code of conduct.
• Recruitment.
• Disciplinary/ethics code and policies.
• Complaints and reporting mechanism.
• Procedure for referral to the relevant authorities.
• Victim support systems.
• Whistleblowing or Speak Up.
• Social media.
• Integrity.
• Diversity, equity and inclusion.
• Anti-bullying.
• Practice guidance (including events; travel; trips; social media; changing rooms; supervision of children).
• Rules governing children who take on roles as coaches, officials, volunteers, mascots, etc.

A network of policies and procedures

To safeguard children and other vulnerable groups, this network of different policies and procedures needs to work together seamlessly – to prevent concerns arising and to respond quickly and effectively when issues come to light. Ensuring that safeguarding is included in other policies and procedures is what is called ‘mainstreaming safeguarding across the organisation’.

Let us now examine developing procedures in more depth.