Duty of Care: What Coaches, Clubs and Volunteers Owe Every Athlete
Understanding Safeguarding · Post 4 of 8
Duty of Care: What Coaches, Clubs and Volunteers Owe Every Athlete
The moment a child steps onto your mat, you take on something both the law and common decency recognise. It's called a duty of care — and it covers far more than scraped knees.
Every time a parent drops a child at training and drives away, they hand over their trust along with their child. That handover isn't just emotional. It carries a real, recognised responsibility — and understanding its shape is one of the foundations of keeping children safe.
What "duty of care" means
A duty of care is the obligation to take reasonable steps to protect the people in your charge from foreseeable harm.
Two words do the heavy lifting. Reasonable: you're not expected to eliminate every risk, but you are expected to take sensible precautions a careful person would take. Foreseeable: harm you could and should have seen coming. Together they set a practical, fair standard — not perfection, but genuine attentiveness.
It's wider than physical injury
Most people picture duty of care as preventing broken bones. That's one layer of three:
- Physical safety: safe equipment and surfaces, adequate supervision, matching children sensibly by size and ability, managing heat and hydration, and not pushing a child through injury.
- Emotional safety: how adults speak to children, whether pressure tips into humiliation, and whether approval is made conditional on results.
- Protection from abuse and bullying: the safeguarding measures that stop other people — adults or peers — from causing harm.
Standing in a parent's place
While minors are in your care, you effectively stand in a parent's place for that session or trip. That's the reason supervision ratios matter, why pick-up and drop-off procedures matter, and why overnight arrangements at camps and tournaments need real thought rather than being improvised on the day.
Volunteers are not exempt
The parent helping run a tournament, the senior student minding the younger group, the driver ferrying kids to an event — each carries a duty of care while children are in their charge. "I'm just a volunteer" is not a shield. If you're responsible for children in a moment, you're responsible for their safety in it.
What reasonable steps look like
- Adults are checked and trained before they work with children.
- Equipment and the training area are safe and regularly checked.
- Supervision ratios are clear and actually kept.
- Everyone knows the emergency and reporting procedures.
- Basic records exist — attendance, incidents, consent.
- No child is left alone or unsupervised with a single adult as a matter of routine.
Getting it wrong has consequences
Falling short of a duty of care can carry legal and reputational costs. But fear of liability is the wrong reason to take it seriously. The right reason is simpler: a child, and their family, trusted you to keep them safe. Meeting that trust well is what it means to run a club that deserves it.
The bottom line
Duty of care isn't legal fine print — it's the practical expression of the trust a parent places in you. Take reasonable steps, think ahead to foreseeable harm, and remember it covers the whole child, not just their body. At WarinHari, that duty is part of the job description for every coach and volunteer who stands in front of a child.
This article is general information, not legal advice. Where a child may be at immediate risk, contact the emergency services without delay. Report a concern any time at report.warinhari.online.