A safeguarding plan on paper won’t keep children safe, people will. If you’re a board safeguarding champion or senior leader, your job is to make sure the plan is owned, resourced, and embedded across the organisation. This explains how to write and co-create a SMART plan and make safeguarding the norm.
Safeguarding succeeds in everyday moments: a coach noticing a change in behaviour, a parent getting involved, a welfare officer following up quickly, a board member asking the right questions. That’s why a safeguarding plan begins before it’s committed to paper and then continues by how it is led, championed and executed. Your plan should help people know what to do, feel able to do it, and genuinely assure other senior leaders and board members that it’s happening.
What a safeguarding plan is for
A plan isn’t a compliance document. It’s not a checklist. It’s a shared, operational agreement. For board champions and senior leaders, it’s also the clearest way to know what’s being done, by who, and whether it’s working. It should answer three questions:
- What safeguarding risks are we managing?
- What expectations are we setting?
- How will we resource, check, embed and improve this over time?
How to build a safeguarding plan people will deliver
1) Make it SMART
Safeguarding plans often fail when they describe intentions and not delivery. If each action doesn’t have a named owner, timeframe, and resources, it can become “the DSL’s job”. From a leadership point of view, that also means you can’t track progress or provide assurance.
Make the plan (here are some examples):
- Specific: “All coaches complete induction” becomes “All coaches complete safeguarding induction before first session.”
- Measurable: track completion, attendance, and confidence (for example quick survey after completing a training course).
- Achievable: match actions to capacity, especially if you rely on volunteers. Can everyone access and understand the induction based on the time and resources they have.
- Relevant and resourced: prioritise actions that reduce your biggest risks. Do you have budget, time, tools, and cover, for example who answers the safeguarding inbox when the DSL is away?
- Time-bound: include dates and review points, nothing is “ongoing”.
Quick test: pick any objective in your plan and ask: Who owns it? By when? What support and resource do they need? If you can’t answer these questions, it’s not yet deliverable.
2) Co-create it with the people who will live it
Safeguarding isn’t something you roll out to people, it’s something you build with them. Co-creation increases the chances the plan is relevant, realistic and achievable. It increases commitment because people back what they’ve helped create. It also reveals people, process or environment blind spots early, before they become incidents.
Involve everyone at different stages throughout the plan’s life cycle.
A simple co-creation session could include what’s working well, where are we most at risk, what would good look like in practice and agree the top three actions and owners.
3) Make safeguarding the norm
Culture is what people do when nobody is checking. Safeguarding should be seen everywhere so it becomes part of how you do sport. Leaders set the tone: what you ask about, what you resource, and what you follow up on quickly becomes what the organisation prioritises.
- Put clear welfare contact details where people will see it (such as venues, joining emails, team chats).
- Use simple and consistent language: explain how to raise a concern, what happens next, what you can or can’t promise about confidentiality and the words to use in the moment.
- Build safeguarding into coaching practice: ratios, arrival and departure, changing areas, photography, online contact.
- Rehearse scenarios: “If a young person reports a concern about X, what do I say and do in the moment?”
- Close the loop: when people raise issues, acknowledge them and explain next steps (within appropriate boundaries).
Next steps for your next 30 days
- Pick your top three safeguarding risks (specific to your sport, venue, and age group).
- Turn each priority into one SMART action with an owner, deadline, and resources.
- Run one co-creation session with coaches and volunteers or one with young people.
- Make reporting routes visible in three places: venue, welcome comms, and online.
- Set a simple recurring board action: what gets reported (themes, actions, learning not just numbers).
View our best practice on writing a safeguarding plan, alongside our plan templates and other tools.