Table Tennis England and the 2026 DBS Change: Redrawing the Safeguarding Line at the Table

Since 1 September 2026, a small line of legal text in Britain has quietly altered the working lives of thousands of adults who stand beside children at table tennis tables. Its name sounds dry: the "supervision exemption." Behind it, though, sits a very human question: when a ten-year-old holds a bat in a crowded hall, must the adult standing nearby pass a criminal record check? Before that date, the answer in England was not always yes. If a volunteer or coach worked with children but always within the line of sight of another person — a supervisor, a head coach, a responsible committee member — the old rules could excuse them from a DBS check. DBS stands for the Disclosure and Barring Service, the body that issues criminal record and barred-list certificates in England and Wales. Without that certificate, a person could still stand close to children, so long as the word "supervised" sat above them like a shield. From 1 September 2026, that shield of words has been removed. The Crime and Policing Act 2026 deleted the supervision exemption from the legal definition of Regulated Activity. In other words, a supervised role is now treated exactly like an unsupervised one. Whether or not another adult is present, anyone regularly working with children in table tennis needs a DBS check. That is why Table Tennis England, the sport's governing body in England, has set up an online webinar to explain the change to its community. It takes place on Tuesday 29 September, from 6 to 7pm UK time, hosted by Kyhl Daly, Table Tennis England's Designated Safeguarding Officer. This is not a vague public-information broadcast about the law. It is an operating briefing: it tells clubs who must do what, from when, and why. Who is it for? Table Tennis England is clear: if you are a Club Welfare Officer, part of a club or league committee, or a volunteer who works regularly with children, this session is for you. That list is deeply characteristic of grassroots table tennis. In England, the sport lives in halls, school gyms, community centres and weekend tournaments. It has no grand arenas and no million-pound contracts, but it has thousands of adult volunteers who unlock a hall every Saturday evening to teach children how to hold a bat. Across years of studying youth development systems, one thing has stayed with me: the most vulnerable places are rarely the loudest. They are the small halls where one adult keeps the keys, the register, the funds, and is also the only person who knows every child's name. That environment is exactly where a legal clause like the supervision exemption can open a large gap. It is also why removing that exemption matters far more than its administrative appearance suggests. The terminology deserves care. Regulated Activity is a legal concept in the English child-protection system. When work falls into this category, the person doing it must meet stricter vetting requirements, and hiring someone who has been barred is a criminal offence. Before September 2026, part of the definition carried an exemption: where an activity took place under continuous and reasonable supervision by another person, it might not count as regulated activity for the supervised individual. That was the crack in the door. That crack turned a legal question into a guessing game. What does "continuous and reasonable supervision" mean in a hall with eight tables, twenty children, and one coach dealing with an issue in the corner? What does it mean at a weekend tournament, when the volunteer watching the changing room is not standing inside it? Supervision on paper is often far thinner in practice. And when a rule rests on a vague concept, the person who ultimately carries the risk is the child, never the rule-maker. From 1 September 2026, that ambiguity disappears in a safer direction. Supervised roles are equated with unsupervised ones. If you regularly work with children in table tennis, you need DBS clearance. There is no longer any "I was only assisting" or "I always had another adult nearby." This is a change of principle: a child's right to protection no longer depends on whether another adult is present, but on the person standing beside the child. Notably, Table Tennis England did not simply announce the law. It opened a webinar to discuss "the changes to DBS requirements, what it means for you, as well as wider information about DBS in table tennis." The word "you" matters here. It turns a legal text into a conversation with operators. In grassroots sport, a law is only worth something when people understand it and can actually follow it under real conditions — with real budgets, real time and real people. I have written many times that a young player is a broken shard of pottery: value lies in the firing, not in the wholeness. But for the shard to be fired correctly, the kiln must be clean first. Safeguarding is not an appendix to talent development. It is the foundation. A development system can produce brilliant players, but if the safeguarding foundation is cracked, everything above it stands on sand. This is what grassroots table tennis people in England are now handling with a very concrete tool: a DBS certificate. A DBS check is not a moral medal. It is a criminal record procedure that can surface prior convictions, warnings relating to children, and cases where a person has been placed on a barred list. It runs through the Disclosure and Barring Service, and the level of check depends on the type of activity. Because work with children sits in the regulated category, the requirement here is higher, not lower. The problem is that the process carries a cost. It costs time — results can take weeks. It costs procedure — forms, identity verification, sometimes a fee. And it carries a social cost rarely discussed: the hesitation of good volunteers who feel suspected when asked to go through a vetting process. This is exactly what any club must prepare for, not only in England but anywhere. But this is also where the counterintuitive angle appears. People often assume a change like removing the supervision exemption will shrink the volunteer community. In practice the opposite usually happens, on one condition: the club must make the process proactive. If a committee turns DBS into a normal step in welcoming new people — like signing a code of conduct or attending a safety briefing — it becomes part of the culture, not a barrier. The problem is not the law. The problem is how a club interprets it. I have seen this across many fields. When a new rule is communicated in a threatening tone, it breeds defensiveness. When it is communicated in a companionable tone, it breeds cooperation. Table Tennis England's 29 September webinar is an example of the second approach: rather than simply dropping a link to the DBS page, they are giving an hour to explain, to answer questions, and to make sure volunteers understand what they must do. There is an important nuance in the announcement: participants will learn about "the importance of the DBS check in safeguarding children in the sport." That phrasing puts the emphasis in the right place. A DBS check is not a procedure against adults. It is a tool to protect children. When the frame of meaning is set correctly, people's attitudes change. Volunteers no longer feel checked like suspects; they feel part of a system of care. This leads to a broader observation about youth sport. We often measure an academy by the number of talents it produces. But there is a rarely named metric that matters more: the level of safety the system creates for its most vulnerable children — the slow developers, the shy ones, the ones without a voice. An academy only truly matures when it protects the children who will never shine. I remember sitting in a youth hall once, watching a coach spend an entire session on a boy who played more slowly than the others. That boy never made a squad list. But the way adults treated him said more about the club's culture than any medal. Safeguarding begins in small moments like that, and it needs procedures strong enough not to depend on whether today's adult happens to be kind. When we talk about a rule like removing the supervision exemption, we are talking about replacing reliance on personal goodwill with a system that can be checked. That is the step of a maturing sport. In Ba Ria-Vung Tau, we do not dig for gold, we dig foundations. That is true of soil, and equally true of sport. Foundations are invisible, but without them no building stands. In Vietnam, we are at a very different stage. Vietnamese table tennis has a growing youth system, with centres, talent classes and ever more junior tournaments. But the legal framework for safeguarding children in sport is young, and a culture of criminal record checks for those working with children is not yet widespread. This is not a criticism. It is a way of naming the gap. Looking at a system like Table Tennis England, we see an image of our own future — and of the problems we will have to solve. What is worth learning from how Table Tennis England handled this change is not the content of the law but the method. They identified a specific affected group. They scheduled an explanation. They chose an authoritative speaker — the Designated Safeguarding Officer. They named who should attend. They provided an information page for follow-up. This is a change-communication process designed for grassroots sport, where a volunteer's time is the scarcest resource. I once wrote that a young player needs someone who can read them before they can read themselves. But the person who reads children also needs a system that can read itself — one that knows who is in the room, who holds the keys, who stays behind after training. The old supervision exemption left a grey zone exactly where it was most dangerous: the gap between the final whistle and the moment a child is collected by a parent. From 1 September 2026, that grey zone has narrowed. No one can hide behind the word "supervised" any more. Supervised roles are treated like unsupervised ones. This means some people will complete a DBS procedure for the first time. For others, it may be the first time they think seriously about what they actually do when they are with children. The moment a legal change becomes a cultural change is the most important moment — and the hardest to measure. No index captures the shift in how an adult sees their role beside a child. But we know it happens when briefings are more than attendance, when questions are asked, when a volunteer says on their own: "What should I do next?" For a sport like table tennis, this change has a particular feature. Table tennis is an intimate discipline, with a small physical distance between teacher and learner — coaches stand close, guide hands, stand behind to adjust posture. It is a sport of proximity, and that proximity, however professionally legitimate, is a sensitive zone for safeguarding. Safeguarding rules therefore carry special weight in table tennis, more than in a sport with greater distance. I think this is why a table tennis governing body would hold a dedicated DBS webinar. Not because table tennis has more problems than other sports, but because the structure of the sport places adults close to children routinely. Proximity is a pedagogical strength and a safeguarding concern at the same time. The two do not contradict; they simply demand a clearer operating frame. There is a paradox worth raising as a contrarian view. One might think tightening DBS requirements will reduce volunteer coaches, and therefore reduce children's chances to play. But a sustainable volunteer community is not built on skipping vetting — it is built on trust that can be demonstrated. A system without checks attracts both good-faith people and bad-faith actors, and it is the good-faith people who are harmed first when an incident occurs. I have watched how sports organisations handle crises. The ones with strong safeguarding processes are not the ones that never have an incident — they are the ones that can handle one without collapsing, because the structure is already in place. By contrast, clubs that skip procedure often fail to protect both the child and their own reputation when something happens. Safeguarding children and protecting the club, at the end of the line, are the same job. For Club Welfare Officers — the webinar's first target — this change adds responsibility. They must ensure everyone working with children holds a valid DBS certificate. They must keep records uninterrupted as the rules change. In many small clubs this is unpaid work, done in the evening, after a day job. A webinar that explains things clearly is therefore practical support, not a formality. The 29 September session is not only about the new law. It also offers broader information on how Table Tennis England runs the DBS process and on the importance of checks in safeguarding children. That is the structure of a good briefing: start with the specific and urgent — what changes, and who is affected — then widen to the underlying principle. Attendees leave not only knowing what to do, but why it matters. There is a question worth asking here, not only for England. As a sports system grows in scale, how does it keep its safeguarding quality? English table tennis is answering that by updating its legal frame and retraining grassroots personnel. Countries with developing table tennis systems can read this as a map. Not to copy the law, but to understand that building youth sport cannot be separated from building a protection system. I have always believed talent does not appear where people look at it, but where people care for it. And care is not only teaching how to place a bat. It includes making sure the environment a child grows up in is safe. A table in a clean, well-ruled room teaches a child more than a table in a dark, ruleless room — even if the technique taught at both is identical. Looking back at sports history, child-protection changes are often treated as an administrative burden at birth, and only a few years later they become part of normal life. A generation on, people cannot imagine a system without them. This is how a cultural layer is made: not by one event, but by repeating a standard until it becomes obvious. I wonder whether, in the future, when people look back at 1 September 2026, they will remember there was once a time when adults working with children under supervision needed no criminal record check. Perhaps they will be surprised, just as we are surprised today by the safety standards of the past that now seem unacceptable. That is a sign of progress: when what was once normal becomes unimaginable. For table tennis clubs in England, the work is clear. Sign up for the 29 September webinar. Review the list of people working with children at the club. Check who has a DBS and who does not. Build a process so newcomers can start early. And most importantly, explain to everyone that this is not suspicion — it is a way of caring together. More broadly, this change is a reminder for the whole youth sport industry. We spend enormous time on technique, tactics, fitness and match psychology. We measure speed, spin and stamina. But there is one metric we rarely measure: how safe a child is inside the system. In the long run, that metric matters more than all the others. A young player may never reach a national team. That is normal. But no child should be harmed while learning to play a sport. This is the minimum any system must guarantee before any other goal is discussed. Removing the supervision exemption is a step in the right direction to make that system more trustworthy. When Table Tennis England opens this webinar, it is doing something more governing bodies should study: turning a legal change into a chance to strengthen culture. They did not merely announce that the law had changed. They invited the community to sit down together to understand, to ask and to prepare. That is how a safeguarding standard gets planted in grassroots soil. I do not watch matches; I read the tactical sediment compressed into ninety minutes. But I also read other layers — the ones beneath the playing floor, where rules, procedures and standards settle over years. Those layers produce no highlights. But they decide who can grow up safely in this sport, and who cannot. There is an open question worth keeping after the 29 September webinar. Removing the supervision exemption is a change of process. But will it change the culture of small halls, where everything depends on a few people and personal reputation? The answer is not in the law. It is in whether clubs use this moment to build new habits. And like every cultural change, it will not come from one evening, but from thousands of small evenings after it. Since 1 September 2026, a line on the floor of English table tennis has been redrawn. From 29 September, the people who run the sport have a chance to understand exactly where that line lies. But a line only matters when someone stands inside it, ready to do the work. And that is always the hardest part of any change — not drawing the line, but keeping it straight.