Table Tennis England hosts DBS webinar: supervision exemption removed from 1 September 2026

At 6pm on Tuesday, 29 September, Table Tennis England will host an online webinar running from 6pm to 7pm to talk through the changes to DBS requirements, what they mean for volunteers, and wider information about DBS in table tennis. The session will be led by Kyhl Daly, the governing body's Designated Safeguarding Officer.

At the centre of the webinar sits a legal change already in force. From 1 September 2026, the Crime and Policing Act 2026 removed the “supervision exemption” from the legal definition of Regulated Activity. Previously, some volunteers and coaches working with children under supervision did not need a DBS check. From that date, supervised roles are treated exactly like unsupervised ones.

To an outsider, this looks like a small edit of wording in a piece of legislation. Inside the world of safeguarding, redefining one phrase can widen or narrow thousands of criminal record checks, reshape how clubs recruit volunteers, and shift the line between what is permitted and what is required. Years of re-reading documents that seem dry as dust gave me a habit: every review reveals another layer of meaning. Trust has to sit in the structure, not in the name.

DBS stands for Disclosure and Barring Service, the UK government body responsible for criminal record checks and for maintaining lists of individuals barred from working with children or vulnerable adults. A DBS check goes beyond administrative procedure. It is the first control point, where the system verifies whether a person has a relevant criminal history or appears on a barred list before that person comes into direct contact with children.

There are several levels of DBS check. The basic level only searches unspent convictions. The standard level adds information on suspended sentences and cautions. The enhanced level, used for roles involving children or vulnerable adults, adds information supplied by local police and may include a check of the barred lists. A role inside Regulated Activity is usually tied to the enhanced level. Understanding the right level is the first step towards neither under-checking nor over-checking.

In table tennis, the working environment has its own character. A training session takes place in the enclosed space of a sports hall. The distance between coach and young player is very small. A coach adjusts a stance, corrects a bat angle, places a hand on a shoulder to fix a movement. The very closeness that makes coaching possible creates an environment where safeguarding cannot rest on goodwill alone. It needs a mechanism.

Regulated Activity is defined in legislation protecting vulnerable people. The term covers activities such as teaching, training, instructing children, giving advice or guidance on wellbeing, and driving children, provided those activities are frequent or intensive. Someone inside Regulated Activity may be required to obtain an enhanced DBS check, including a check of the barred lists.

The phrase “supervision exemption” sounds technical, but the logic behind it was fairly simple. Under the old rules, if a person carried out activity involving children but was always supervised regularly and day-to-day by someone else, that person was not considered to be carrying out Regulated Activity. Falling outside that scope, they were not required to hold a DBS check.

That created a gap. In practice, supervision does not always happen continuously. A coach may leave the room for a few minutes. A volunteer may take a child to the toilet, open a door, or walk a child to another area with no one beside them. A single short window without supervision is enough to break the protective line.

Removing the exemption reflects a stricter reading of risk. The new principle bets on one thing: safeguarding cannot depend on the assumption that someone is always standing nearby. When supervision becomes a loose condition, it becomes the weak point of the whole system.

The Crime and Policing Act 2026 has deleted that exemption. From 1 September 2026, a supervised role is treated exactly like an unsupervised one. If the work involves children and meets the criteria on frequency or intensity, the person carrying it out needs a DBS check, regardless of anyone standing beside them. This is the point every club needs to grasp before the new season.

For clubs, the consequences are operational rather than theoretical. A club that once relied on the supervision exemption to recruit volunteers for junior sessions may have to review its entire personnel list. Roles that seemed to sit outside the requirement may suddenly fall inside it. Assistant coaches, hall supervisors, and regular drivers of children may all need to be reconsidered.

The webinar on 29 September is where Table Tennis England will explain these changes in detail. It takes place online, from 6pm to 7pm, and attendees must register in advance through the governing body's channels.

The target audience covers those with direct responsibility for safeguarding across the table tennis system: Club Welfare Officers, members of club or league committees, and volunteers who work regularly with children. These three groups represent three layers of the same mechanism: the person holding legal responsibility, the person making decisions, and the person in direct contact.

The session will cover the regulatory change and how it affects attendees themselves and the volunteers they work with. Attendees will also hear about Table Tennis England's DBS processes and the importance of the DBS check in safeguarding children in the sport. The Q&A segment is the chance to clarify specific situations facing individual clubs.

Kyhl Daly, who leads the session, holds the role of Designated Safeguarding Officer at the governing body. The position coordinates safeguarding policy, handles reports concerning the safety of children and vulnerable adults, and connects clubs with the national governing body. That a webinar on a legal change is led by the governing body's own safeguarding lead shows the level of priority attached to the issue.

One operational problem every club will face is scale. Where a club once needed a DBS check for a handful of lead coaches, the list may now stretch to assistant coaches, junior volunteers, hall supervisors, and regular drivers of children. The number of files to process can double or triple after a single review.

Time and cost are two grey variables. An enhanced DBS check is not free, and processing can take days or weeks. For a small club with only a few volunteers, several people entering the process at once can slow recruitment and push administrative costs up. Clubs with thin resources will feel this pressure more sharply than large ones.

One mechanism eases the burden of repetition: the Update Service. When a volunteer registers for it, the result of a check can be reused for similar roles instead of starting from scratch. This is something clubs should raise with volunteers from the outset, because it saves time on both sides and keeps records valid.

Club Welfare Officers carry this burden directly. They must track records, chase deadlines, store documents, and ensure that everyone in contact with children sits inside the valid zone. In many clubs this is unpaid voluntary work, often done by someone learning on the job. A change in regulation can turn a role that looked light into a role heavy with administration, and that is a risk to be acknowledged rather than ignored.

This leads to a common confusion that needs to be separated clearly. A DBS check and safeguarding training are two different things. A DBS check verifies criminal history. It does not teach anyone how to spot signs of abuse, how to record concerns, or how to escalate information. A person with a clean DBS check may still lack knowledge of procedure. A person trained in safeguarding skills may still lack a background check. Both conditions must exist together for the system to hold.

And here is the blind spot I have repeatedly reminded myself to face. A DBS check is a snapshot taken at one moment, not an enduring guarantee. It shows that a person has not been convicted or placed on a barred list as of the check date. It says nothing about future behaviour, about how a person responds under pressure, or about situations never recorded. Anyone who has run an organisation knows that most problems emerge in the gap between paperwork and reality.

So if attention focuses only on paperwork, a system can create a false sense of safety. A genuine safeguarding structure also includes a reporting culture, clear procedures, and channels through which children or parents can speak up without fear of retaliation. A fully completed checklist without a culture of listening will protect no one. This is the hardest part to measure, and the easiest to overlook when people are chasing deadlines.

For small clubs, the change creates a balancing act. On one side, stricter requirements remove people who carry risk. On the other, cost and procedure can push away the good-natured volunteers who were already scarce. If a club loses volunteers to paperwork, children may lose the chance to play. This is the kind of trade-off with no easy answer, and how clubs handle it will shape the quality of grassroots table tennis.

The data protection angle also deserves mention. Information from a DBS check is sensitive data. Storing, sharing, and destroying documents must comply with data protection rules. A mistake here can harm the volunteer themselves and create legal risk for the club. Records management cannot be separated from managing the trust people place in an organisation.

Back to the concept of supervision. Removing the supervision exemption does not make supervision meaningless. On the contrary, it sets a higher standard for supervision. When a person still needs a DBS check even with someone beside them, supervision is separated from the role of exemption. What remains to be asked is whether that supervision genuinely happens regularly and day-to-day, and whether it is recorded so it can be verified later. Every time I review a process again, I find another gap.

Worth noting is how behaviour shifts with the environment. The same volunteer may behave very differently when they know every interaction is observed, compared with when they think nobody is watching. A supervision structure, properly carried out, protects not only children but also adults against false allegations. It creates a record for both sides, and that record is often the only tool available when an incident needs to be clarified.

The re-check cycle is also an open question. Some clubs run periodic checks, others rely on the Update Service to track changes. The absence of a unified standard across clubs can produce differences in safety levels between training environments. A child moving from one club to another may step into a space with different standards, even under the same governing body.

For volunteers, the webinar on 29 September is a chance to ask questions directly. The question worth asking is: which roles in my club meet the frequent or intensive criteria and therefore need a DBS check. Another question worth asking is: who is responsible for tracking records, and how will the process run when someone is found to have an incomplete check. The answers to these two questions tend to reveal a club's real level of readiness.

In a broader sense, this change reflects a trend in UK sport: a shift from personal trust to system responsibility. Clubs can no longer lean on a coach's reputation to bypass procedure. The structure must come first, and people must be verified within that framework. The trend does not stop at table tennis; it is shaping how every sport runs its safeguarding work.

Through years of watching how sports organisations handle safeguarding, I have learned that big changes often begin with small wording. A phrase deleted from a legal definition can trigger a cascade of adjustments in recruitment, training, record-keeping, and club culture. Reading legislation closely is how to see those changes coming, rather than reacting once deadlines are close.

Based on my experience following matches and management processes in sport, I have always believed that an organisation that audits itself will weather legal change better than one that merely chases rules. Compliance by reaction will create fresh gaps the moment regulation shifts again. Compliance rooted in understanding the structure will last longer.

Before the webinar takes place on 29 September, the most useful thing a club can do is set aside one session to list every role involving children, compare it against the new definition of Regulated Activity, and identify who needs a DBS check. With that list in hand, the webinar becomes a place to ask the right questions, rather than only to hear general information. Safeguarding does not end at a piece of paper; it begins with understanding your own structure.