Developed in partnership with UK Sport, the NSPCC CPSU and Ann Craft Trust, this new forum provides a dedicated space for professionals across the high performance, Olympic, and Paralympic World Class Programmes.
We launched this forum in summer 2025 to explore emerging safeguarding challenges in elite environments. The forum provides an opportunity to share best practice, learn from experts, network with colleagues across the high- performance community, and deepen knowledge of child and adult safeguarding.
We ran two successful forums in 2025: One online, and another in person. Following these sessions, we held the first of the 2026 forum online in April. Over 30 attendees from a wide range of UK Sport funded organisations joined the forum.
Social Protect, and Knowledge Sharing
During the forum, we heard an update from Shane Britton, founder of Social Protect. This is a ground-breaking new service that UK Sport has invested in to protect all World Class Performance Programme athletes and staff from online abuse throughout the current Olympic cycle. You can learn more about this service here.
Attendees also got to hear from Joanna Cook, Performance Manager from British Volleyball Federation; and Geraldine Costello, Governance and Safe Sport Director from British Gymnastics. They both shared practices and developments from their respective organisations to support knowledge sharing between organisations.
The Next Forum
We’ll hold our next in-person forum on 7 July 2026, once again in partnership with UK Sport and NSPCC CPSU.
Last November’s forum set the bar high. But you can expect more great guest speakers who will share their research findings and expertise, as well as the opportunity for networking and learning from each other.