How a Newbury judo club kept its juniors with SEND past the first term

Alun Jeffries is head coach at Kennet Valley Judo Club in Newbury: 58 juniors aged six to 15, three groups training on Tuesday and Thursday evenings in a council leisure centre's studio, two paid coaches and five volunteers. In the 2024-25 season, seven children with special educational needs or disabilities joined the club. By Christmas, five of them had stopped coming.

Where the club started

Alun is a third dan who has coached in Newbury for 16 years. He works days as a maintenance planner at a business park and runs the club with Fiona Marsh, the second paid coach, and a rota of five volunteers, mostly parents who have taken their coaching awards.

The club had a good reputation with local families of autistic children. Word of mouth from one family brought three more in September 2024. That should have been good news.

• The joining form asked "Does your child have any medical conditions or diagnoses?" and nothing else. Answers sat in a ring binder in the equipment cupboard.
• Sessions were planned on the day. Groups sometimes swapped halves of the mat at short notice when the leisure centre double-booked.
• The three groups had no fixed coach. Whoever was free took whichever group needed covering.
• Nobody followed up when a child stopped coming. The subs just stopped.

What was actually going wrong?

In January 2025 Alun phoned the five families who had left. All five took the call. None of them blamed judo.

The reasons were small and specific. One boy had been told to line up for a throw in front of the whole group with no warning and froze. Another found the clap-and-shout start to randori unbearable. Two families said a volunteer had told their child to "stop messing about" when they walked to the edge of the mat to calm down. One girl simply never saw the same coach twice and stopped trusting any of them.

In every case, the parent had written the diagnosis on the form. In every case, the coach on the mat had never seen it.

"We had the information in a binder in a cupboard. That's the honest version. Every one of those five families had told us their child was autistic or had ADHD, and not one coach had read it before standing in front of them. We weren't excluding anyone on purpose. We just never did anything with what they told us."

What Kennet Valley set up in Bitir

Alun, Fiona and the club's welfare officer worked from our guide to including children with SEND in clubs and classes and the Equality Act 2010 duty to make reasonable adjustments, and made the changes over the summer of 2025.

1. A call instead of a form. Every new family now gets a 15-minute call before the first session, with six questions about what helps and what makes things harder. Families with existing members were offered the same call, and nine took it.
2. Six-line profiles on each child's Bitir member record, visible only to the managers of that child's group channel and the welfare officer. No diagnosis field. Just what to do.
3. A fixed coach per group. Alun takes the six-to-nines, Fiona the ten-to-twelves and a senior volunteer the 13-to-15s. Cover comes from a named deputy who is also a manager of that channel.
4. Changes to the main sessions. The session plan is posted in each group's channel the evening before. A blue mat in the corner is the quiet mat, and any child can sit on it without asking. Randori starts with a raised hand, not a shout. Every technique is shown before it is explained.
5. One rota rule. Nobody coaches or covers a group until they have opened that group's profiles in Bitir, which the welfare officer can see.

The club decided against a separate SEND session. Two volunteers argued for one. Alun's view was that it would become the place every child with a label got sent, and that the main sessions would never change. One family did ask for a gentler start, and their son trained for the first 30 minutes only for his first month.

What changed in the numbers?

Alun compared the 2024-25 intake with the children who joined between September 2025 and the end of the spring term in April 2026.

The 19 profiles cover the ten new juniors with SEND and nine existing members whose families asked for one. Three of those nine had never mentioned anything on the old form.

The one child who left did so after moving to Reading in March. His mother asked Alun to send his profile to the club he was joining, which he did with her written consent.

"The quiet mat gets used by kids with no diagnosis at all. A lad who'd had a rough day at school sat on it for ten minutes last month, then came back and did his best randori of the term. That's when I stopped thinking of it as a SEND thing."

What Alun does in Bitir

• Member profiles with role-limited visibility for each child's six-line plan, which other parents and other groups' coaches cannot see.
• Pinned session plans in each group's channel, posted the evening before.
• Roles that make each group's coach and named deputy its only managers.
• Attendance registers for every session, which show when a child's visits start to tail off so Alun can call before they stop.
• Dated tasks for the four-week review of every new profile, assigned to the group's coach.

What he would tell another club

• Phone the families who left. They will tell you exactly what went wrong.
• Ask what helps, not what the diagnosis is.
• Give each group the same coach every week. Consistency did more than any single adjustment.
• Change the main session before you think about a separate one.
• Make reading the profiles part of being on the rota.

What's next

The club is putting two volunteers through a short autism awareness course in the summer, paid from a £400 grant from the local community foundation. Alun also wants every new profile reviewed with the child as well as the parent by week four, and plans to report the first-term retention figure at the AGM each year.

Related reading: including children with SEND in clubs and classes, and member records, medical details and consent.