Safeguarding Communication in Youth Groups: How to Message Under-18s Safely

Keeping Children Safe in Education, the Department for Education's statutory guidance for England, requires every school to hold a staff behaviour policy that covers communications with pupils and the use of mobile technology. Junior sports clubs, youth clubs and independent coaching groups usually sit outside that statutory duty and need the same rule anyway, because the insurer, the national governing body and the club's own volunteers all ask one question after something goes wrong: where is the record?

What does safeguarding actually require from a youth group's messaging?

Three things, and none of them are technical.

The first is transparency. Nothing an adult writes to a young person should be something they would rewrite if they knew the designated safeguarding lead was reading it. The NSPCC's Child Protection in Sport Unit, which advises governing bodies and clubs across UK sport, builds its online-communication advice on that principle: adults keep contact open, visible and appropriate to the role, rather than private and personal.

The second is that records outlive people. Youth groups turn volunteers over constantly. A club whose entire communication history sits in five WhatsApp groups created by four different coaches has no history at all, it has a set of personal phones.

The third is proportionate access. An assistant coach who helps with the under-11s does not need to read anything about the under-16 squad, and a parent volunteer running the raffle does not need member contact details at all. Access follows the role. That is the same discipline described in our guide to member privacy in group programmes, applied to children.

One legal detail is worth knowing precisely. In the UK, the Data Protection Act 2018 sets 13 as the age at which a child can consent to an information society service on their own account. Below that, the account relationship belongs to the parent. This is not a suggestion about parenting style, it is the basis on which a club decides who holds the login.

Should a coach ever message a young person one to one?

Not on a personal channel, and not without a record. We would hold that line even when it is inconvenient, and it is often inconvenient.

The reasoning is simple enough. One-to-one contact between an adult and a child, invisible to any third party, is the exact condition that every safeguarding framework in UK youth work is written to prevent. The Scouts' code of practice for adults, the yellow card that every leader carries, works on the same logic: adults avoid putting themselves in a one-to-one position with a young person, online included. A rule that only applies in a sports hall and not in a direct message is not a rule.

The counter-argument deserves a fair hearing. A 17-year-old sprinter who wants to ask their coach about a hamstring niggle should not have to route the question through a parent, and treating a sixth-former like an eight-year-old is a good way to lose them. That is a real trade-off, and the answer is not to ban the conversation.

The answer is to change its shape. Keep individual conversations inside the club's own app rather than a personal number, with a second adult able to see them, or run them in a small group that includes another coach. The young person gets a direct answer. The adult gets a witness. Nobody has to remember what was said.

Emergencies are the honest exception. A coach stuck at a fixture with an injured player will ring a mobile, and should. The rule that matters is what happens next: log it the same day, in the club's record, with what was said and why the usual route was not used.

Why is a personal WhatsApp group the wrong place for a youth club?

Because of what it publishes and what it keeps.

A WhatsApp group hands every member's mobile number to every other member of that group. For a club with 60 families that is 60 phone numbers distributed to 60 households, none of whom agreed to that specifically, plus whichever teenagers have their parent's phone unlocked. Coaches we speak to often say the same thing about the other direction: "I've got 60 families with my personal mobile number and no way of getting it back."

Then there is ownership. The group belongs to whoever created it. When that volunteer leaves in March after a disagreement about subs, the club's history leaves with them, and the incoming coach starts from nothing. Assistant coaches cannot be given limited access, because there is no such concept. Nothing can be exported for an insurer.

None of that is an argument about a competitor being bad software. WhatsApp is excellent at what it was built for, which is people who chose to know each other's numbers talking informally. A youth club is not that, and the reasons coaches move off it are structural rather than aesthetic.

How do you set this up without adding a job to the club's week?

Take Kestrel Vale Judo in Stockport as the worked example: 62 members aged 7 to 16, nine volunteer coaches, four of them under 21, run by a lead coach called Marie Ellwood on two weekday evenings and a Saturday morning. Setting the structure up took her an evening. Running it costs about ten minutes a week.

1. One private group per squad. Juniors, intermediates, seniors. A parent in the juniors group never reads the seniors' grading logistics, and volunteers are added to the squad they actually coach.
2. The account holder follows the age. Under 13, the parent holds it. From 13, the member holds their own with the parent in a linked parent group. Marie posts every announcement to both, once.
3. Phone numbers stay hidden. Members appear by name. Nobody harvests a number by scrolling a member list, and a family leaving the club does not leave their mobile behind in 60 address books.
4. Consent and logistics go out as deadline polls. Grading entries, away fixture transport, photo permissions. One question, one cut-off, one screen showing who has not answered, rather than 40 replies in a thread.
5. Concerns are private notes, not messages. Anything about a specific child goes in that child's note, visible to Marie as safeguarding lead. A coach who notices a pattern writes it the same evening while it is still accurate.
6. Roles are limited on purpose. The four under-21 coaches can mark attendance and post session plans. They cannot see per-member notes or contact details, which protects them as much as it protects the members.
7. Leavers are removed, records are not. When a coach stops volunteering, their access ends that day and everything they wrote stays with the club.

Marie's rule for the two-adult principle is worth copying: every group has at least two adults in it, always, including the parent groups. It costs nothing and it means no conversation in the club is ever adult-to-child in private.

What should a youth group's communication policy say?

Keep it to one side of A4 that a new volunteer reads before their first session, and put it in front of parents at joining, alongside the joining agreement.

• Which channel the club uses, and that no other channel is official.
• That adults never contact members from a personal number or personal social account.
• That every group contains at least two adults.
• Who holds the account at each age, and what parents can see.
• Response-time expectations, so a parent messaging at 23:00 is not left waiting for a coach who is asleep.
• How a concern is recorded, who it goes to, and the deadline for logging it. Same day is the only workable answer.
• What happens when a volunteer leaves, and how long records are kept.

The last two lines are the ones clubs skip, and they are the ones that get read out later.

Related reading: how a Sheffield karate school replaced its paper belt register, and how a junior football academy handles squad communication across eight age groups.