How a Shipley youth club got 214 messages a month off its staff's personal phones

Riverbank Youth Club opens four nights a week in a converted mill building in Shipley, West Yorkshire, for 140 young people aged 11 to 17. In November 2024 a funder's safeguarding review counted 214 messages sent to members in one month from four staff mobile numbers, across six WhatsApp groups that nobody at the club could produce in full. Duncan Reeve, the youth work manager, had 60 days to fix it. What he actually fixed was bigger than the audit finding.

Where the club started

Duncan has been in youth work for 18 years, the last seven at Riverbank. The club runs a junior night for 11 to 13s, two senior nights for 14 to 17s, and a Friday drop-in that anybody in that age range can walk into. Three paid staff, one of them part time, and 12 volunteers.

The communication setup had grown the way most of them do, by accident.

• Two WhatsApp groups for juniors, created by a worker who had left in 2023.
• Two for seniors, one of which nobody could remember the purpose of.
• A parents' group with 96 members, in which everybody could see everybody's number.
• A staff group that regularly carried the names of young people.
• Individual threads between workers and members, on personal numbers, at all hours.

Nobody at Riverbank was careless. Every worker had an enhanced DBS check, safeguarding training was current, and Duncan is the designated safeguarding lead. The problem was structural, which is the kind that survives good intentions. Youth work in England is held to safeguarding standards set out by the National Youth Agency, the professional body for the sector, and the standard Riverbank was failing was the dull one: keep an accurate, retrievable record.

What the audit actually found

The reviewer asked for one thing on the first morning: every message exchanged with a named 15-year-old over the previous term.

It took two days and produced a partial answer. Two of the threads sat on a phone belonging to a sessional worker who had left the previous year. One group's history had been cleared when a worker changed handset. The individual messages existed but had no context, because the club-side half of the conversation had happened out loud in a corridor.

The 214 figure came out of that exercise. Not one of those messages was inappropriate. All of them were invisible to the organisation.

The second finding hurt more. Across the audited year the club had recorded 13 safeguarding concerns, and only four were written up within 24 hours of being noticed. The rest were reconstructed later, sometimes a week later, from memory.

"The reviewer never suggested anyone had done anything wrong," Duncan says. "She asked a much worse question. She asked what I would hand a social worker at nine in the morning if a young person disclosed something on a Friday night, and I did not have a good answer."

"She asked what I would hand a social worker at nine in the morning if a young person disclosed something on a Friday night, and I did not have a good answer."

What Riverbank set up in Bitir

Duncan trialled the new structure on the junior night first, for six weeks, before moving the seniors across. The design follows the rules set out in our guide to safeguarding communication in youth groups.

1. One private group per night and age band. Juniors, Tuesday seniors, Thursday seniors, Friday drop-in. A parent in juniors no longer reads a residential briefing for 16-year-olds.
2. Account holder set by age. Under 13, the parent holds the account. From 13, the young person holds their own, with a linked parent group that receives logistics and attendance and nothing else.
3. Member phone numbers hidden. Everyone appears by name. The 96-number parents' group stopped existing overnight, which two families had been quietly unhappy about for years.
4. Two adults in every group, without exception. Including parent groups. No worker holds a private line to a member.
5. Concerns as private per-member notes. Written before the worker leaves the building, visible to Duncan as safeguarding lead, timestamped at the moment of writing.
6. Role-limited volunteer access. Volunteers mark attendance and post session information for their own night. They cannot see notes or contact details.
7. Consent and trips as deadline polls. One question, one cut-off, a visible list of who has not replied, and a reminder that only goes to them.

The part Duncan expected to be hard was the 16 and 17 year olds, who had the most to lose from a system that treated them like children. It went the other way. Seniors got their own accounts, their own group, and a way to message the club that did not involve a worker's private mobile, and the take-up was faster than the juniors'.

What changed in the numbers

Duncan compared the 12 months after roll-out with the audited year, using the reviewer's own definitions so the comparison would hold.

The consent number paid for itself immediately. A residential in July 2025 needed 34 consents and had 32 by the Wednesday cut-off, against a previous pattern of chasing families on the coach steps. The two outstanding were phoned, not messaged, and both were sorted before Friday.

Attendance mattered for a different reason. Riverbank reports session numbers to the local authority and to two grant funders, and until 2024 those numbers were assembled at the end of each quarter from a mix of paper sheets and recollection. They are now a report Duncan runs in about a minute, and they are defensible.

One result Duncan did not predict: the club found young people it was losing. Marking attendance every session made a pattern visible that nobody had spotted in the paper era, which is that a member who misses three consecutive Thursdays almost never comes back on their own. Nine members were contacted in the first year under that rule, following the same logic as any programme trying to stop quiet drop-off. Six returned.

What he would tell another youth club

• Do the audit yourself before somebody does it to you. Count a month of personal-number messages. The number will be higher than you expect and it ends the debate about whether this matters.
• Write the concern before you leave the building. Not that night, not the next morning. A record written 20 minutes after an event and one written a week later are different documents.
• Give the older members their own accounts. Routing a 17-year-old through their parent is how you lose them, and it does not make anyone safer.
• Put two adults in every group, including the parent groups. It is the cheapest safeguarding control there is.
• Decide what happens to records when someone leaves, in writing, before someone leaves.

"We did not become a safer club because we bought software. We became a safer club because the software made it impossible to keep doing the thing we knew we should have stopped."

What's next

Riverbank has added a 14-strong young leaders group, where 16 and 17 year olds take on session-planning tasks with their own deadlines, and is piloting a per-member record of accreditation progress for young people working towards a level 1 youth work award. Duncan is also rewriting the club's one-page communication policy into a version that its two partner clubs in Bradford can adopt directly.

Related reading: safeguarding communication in youth groups: how to message under-18s safely, and attendance tracking for classes and clubs.