Kent Sport: Safeguarding Adults in a County Sports Partnership

Kent Sport - Safeguarding CSP

If you’re part of a County Sports Partnership (CSP), you might be wondering how to embed safeguarding adults into your practices.

Nicola File is the Projects Officer (Under-Represented Groups) at Kent Sport. In this guest post, she explains her experience of embedding safeguarding adults into her CSP.

In order to fully implement the new Sport England Primary role, we made some internal changes at Kent Sport. This included giving the Projects Officer for Under-Represented Groups the responsibility of leading work on Safeguarding Adults at Risk.

We started work on Safeguarding Adults at Risk a couple of years ago. Safeguarding Children and Young People is firmly cemented in the core work of a County Sports Partnership. So we were keen to ensure there was a clear vision for how Safeguarding Adults in Sport and Activity could look.

In order to focus our work, Kent Sport has developed a new Safeguarding Adults Action Plan. We also have a refreshed policy, launched in January 2019, which has been endorsed by the Kent and Medway Safeguarding Adults Board.

Spreading Knowledge and Expertise

Part of our action plan is to work with key partners and stakeholders to help spread knowledge and expertise on this topic.

Working closely with Kent FA, we delivered a ‘Super Saturday’ event during National Safeguarding Adults Week in November 2018. This included a Mental Health First Aid workshop in the morning, and an Ann Craft Trust presentation on Safeguarding Adults in Sport and Physical Activity in the afternoon. It was a successful day. Both workshops received positive feedback, and all participants say they have an increased level of knowledge and confidence.

In 2019 we are looking to continue to share our knowledge even wider, as well as ACT’s numerous resources. We will also continue to work closely with ACT to learn from best practice across the network.

Local Support

We also plan to produce resources specifically for local partners in the Kent & Medway area. These will all be integrated into the new Kent Sport Project Management Guide to ensure the principles are embedded across the whole team. This will create consistency across projects. Furthermore, Clubmark, along with the new Clubmatters tools and resources, will help support clubs across the county.

Kent Sport is committed to embedding the principles of equality, diversity and safeguarding young people & adults. We aim to develop a skilled and motivated workforce to help change lives through sport and physical activity.

Want advice on embedding safeguarding adults into your CSP? Get in touch for a chat.