When a parent drops their child at a training session, something significant is happening that has nothing to do with football. They are extending trust — not just to the organisation, and not just to the coach standing on that pitch, but to the whole environment: the people, the processes, the culture, the response when something goes wrong. That trust is not a given. It has to be earned, and it has to be maintained deliberately. "Safe" is not something you claim in a brochure. It is something you demonstrate through what you have built.
We think about safeguarding in four areas, each of which requires real infrastructure rather than good intentions.
The first is vetting. Before any coach or staff member works with children at Red Dust Rising, they go through an identity verification process, reference checks from prior roles, and — where legally available — a background screening relevant to working with minors. This is not bureaucracy for its own sake. It is the minimum standard that any credible children's organisation should be able to demonstrate, and it is the kind of record that a parent should be able to ask about and receive a straight answer to.
The second is our safeguarding policy. This is a published document, not an internal memo. It describes who is responsible for child welfare at every level of the organisation, what constitutes a concern, what the reporting obligations are, and how the organisation responds when something is raised. The policy exists because good intentions are insufficient — you need to know what to do before you need to do it. The policy is reviewed annually and revisited after any incident that makes a review necessary.
The third is the Designated Safeguarding Lead. Every session, every programme, every communication channel has a named individual who holds responsibility for child welfare. This person is trained in safeguarding practice and is the point of contact when anyone — child, parent, coach, or volunteer — has a concern, however minor it might seem. One of the consistent findings in safeguarding failures is that people didn't report because they weren't sure it was serious enough, or they didn't know who to tell. We remove both of those barriers.
The fourth is the code of conduct. All staff and coaches sign it before working with any child. The core principles are not complicated: no one-to-one contact with a child without a second adult present, no private messaging with players, all activities conducted in observable and interruptible spaces, no physical punishment, no humiliation — not as discipline, not as motivation, not as a cultural norm inherited from another era of coaching. These are not optional. They are non-negotiable operating conditions, and breaching them is a disciplinary matter, not a conversation.
We also take children through an age-appropriate version of what they're entitled to expect and what they can do if something makes them uncomfortable. Players should know that they have a voice, and that using it will be treated seriously rather than dismissed. That expectation needs to be set explicitly, not assumed.
Photography and media consent is handled separately from the enrolment process. Being registered in a programme does not mean we have permission to photograph your child or use their image in our communications. We ask for that specifically, we explain what we use images for, and parents can withdraw consent at any time. This is a small thing administratively but an important one in terms of how it signals that we take consent seriously as a practice, not just a legal checkbox.
None of this makes safeguarding simple, and we make no claim that our structure is perfect. What we can say is that the structure exists, that it is documented, that it is maintained, and that it is there to be scrutinised. If you want to read the full policy before registering your child in any programme, you should — and you can.
The policy will tell you who the DSL is, what the reporting process looks like, and how we handle allegations against staff. It will also tell you when we last reviewed it. We'd rather you read it and ask hard questions than trust us without doing so. That's how this is supposed to work.