Child Protection Concerns
If you have a concern over the safety of your child, the guidance provided here will hopefully help you to deal with them.
All Clubs and event organisers have the responsibility to ensure that all children and young people have the opportunity to participate in angling in a safe and welcoming environment. It is the responsibility of all those supporting these events to work together to ensure this can happen. The club/fishery has a duty of care towards children when they are participating in any activity.
Clubs and fisheries should have evidence of signing up to appropriate safeguarding standards and having relevant insurance cover in place for the activities involved.
You should always expect a high standard from clubs, whether the coaches/instructors are employees or volunteers, because they all have a duty to care for your son or daughter.
You should expect that:
- you will always be welcome to watch sessions.
- sessions will be supervised by an appropriate number of coaches/instructors/adults.
- coaches/instructors won’t regularly single out individual children or show favouritism.
- coaches/instructors won’t demonstrate a ‘win at all costs’ mentality, an ethos that doesn’t have the child’s best interest in mind.
Even when a club is operating to a high standard, you might still notice problems. You need to decide if this is due to poor practice on the part of the coach/instructor etc., but unlikely to cause significant harm, or if it’s something more serious.
In both situations you should talk to the person responsible for safeguarding within your club but if you have further concerns, please use the following details:
Child Protection in Sport Unit, www.thecpsu.org.uk, 0116 234 7278
NSPCC, www.nspcc.org.uk, 0808 800 5000 (24 hour helpline)