Risk Assessments for Club Sessions: What to Write, Who Signs It, and When to Redo It

Under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, only employers with five or more employees must write their risk assessment down. Almost every club, class and community group should do it anyway, on one page, and then spend more effort on the 90 seconds before each session than on the document itself.

Does a club legally need a written risk assessment?

If the club employs people, yes. Every employer in Great Britain has to assess the risks its work creates, and employers with five or more employees must record the significant findings. A club with two paid coaches is an employer, and the self-employed instructor who hires a hall is covered by the same law for their own sessions.

A club run entirely by volunteers sits largely outside those duties. That does not make the question go away. The club still owes its members a duty of care, and in practice three people will ask for the document before you get anywhere near a court: your insurer, your national governing body and whoever owns the venue. Schools and councils that rent out halls increasingly ask for it at booking.

So write it. The question worth spending time on is how short it can be while still being true.

What are the five steps, applied to a club session?

The Health and Safety Executive's risk assessment guidance breaks the job into five steps. Its own framing is the right starting point for a club: "The law does not expect you to eliminate all risk." The aim is reasonable precautions, not a risk-free hall.

1. Identify the hazards. Walk the space at the time you actually use it. A sports hall at 6pm on a wet Thursday in November has hazards that a 10am visit in June will miss.
2. Decide who might be harmed and how. Participants, but also younger siblings waiting on the benches, parents in the car park and volunteers moving kit.
3. Evaluate the risks and decide on precautions. For each hazard, what you already do and what you will add.
4. Record your findings. One row per significant hazard, with a named person responsible.
5. Review and update. A date, and a list of things that force an early review.

Notice what is not on the list: rating every hazard on a five-by-five matrix. Scoring can help a large organisation compare risks across sites. For a club with one hall, it mostly produces numbers nobody uses.

What does a one-page club risk assessment look like?

Take Calder Juniors Netball in Halifax: 42 players aged eight to 14, two sessions every Thursday in a secondary school sports hall rented from the council, one paid coach and five volunteers.

Their club secretary walked the hall at 5.45pm on a Thursday in January and found nine hazards worth writing down. The page has five columns: hazard, who is at risk, what we do, who is responsible, last checked. Some of the rows:

• Wet floor by the fire door, where players come in from the car park in the rain. Mat inside the door, floor checked before warm-up, session lead responsible.
• Stacked chairs at the far end of the hall, left by the school. Moved behind the curtain before play, or the end third of the court is not used.
• Post bases, which are heavy and catch ankles. Padded and positioned by two adults, never by players.
• Jewellery and long nails, checked at the register.
• Six players with asthma, whose inhalers go in a labelled box at courtside, not in bags in the changing room.
• Pick-up in an unlit car park, handled by the club's late collection rule.

That is the whole document. It fits on one side of A4, every coach has read it, and the session lead can recite the three things that change week to week.

What should happen before every session?

This is the part most clubs skip, and the one we would put first if forced to choose.

Sport coaches call it a dynamic risk assessment, which makes it sound grander than it is. The session lead arrives ten minutes early and checks a short list: floor dry and clear, exits unblocked, equipment set up by adults, first aid kit and inhalers present, enough adults for the numbers on the register. At Calder it takes about 90 seconds. If something fails, the lead adjusts the session or does not start it.

The written assessment tells you what to look for. The check is when you actually look. Our guide to adult-to-child ratios covers the headcount part of that check in more detail.

How often should the assessment be reviewed?

Put a date on it, at the start of each term or season. Then review it straight away whenever one of these happens:

• an injury, incident or near miss
• a new venue, or a change to the one you use
• a new activity, such as a tournament day or a trip
• a new group, especially younger children or anyone with additional needs

Near misses are the trigger clubs most often ignore. Nobody was hurt, so nothing gets written down, and the same loose floor tile catches someone properly three weeks later. If your club logs accidents and incidents, add near misses to the same log and read it at every review.

Should a club use a downloaded template?

Use one for the column headings, then throw the rest away. A 14-page generic template, filled in once by the most careful person on the committee and filed in a shared drive, protects nobody. Nobody standing in the hall at 6pm has read it, and it lists hazards from a venue you do not use while missing the chairs the school leaves out every week.

We would rather see one honest page written in the hall than a long one written at a desk. Governing body templates are good at reminding you of sport-specific hazards, so read yours. Then write your own page for your own space.

How does Bitir help clubs keep the assessment alive?

In Bitir, the assessment can live as a pinned post in a managers-only channel, so every coach and session lead sees the current version on their phone rather than an old printout. The review date sits as a dated task assigned to one person, and a near miss posted in that channel becomes the reason for an early review instead of a passing comment. Attendance records show who was at each session, which is the first question after any incident.

Related reading: how a Leicester BMX club started recording every incident, and how a Coventry table tennis club stopped running sessions under ratio.