Health and safety for children's clubs: risk assessments, accidents and the law in the UK

Who UK health and safety law applies to

The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 places duties on employers and on the self-employed whose work could put other people at risk. If you pay anyone to coach, assist or run the desk, you are an employer and the Act applies in full. If you are a sole trader running classes alone, it still applies because the children and parents in the hall are 'other people' affected by your work.

Wholly volunteer-run clubs are a grey area the HSE addresses directly: the Act does not generally cover organisations with no employees, but the civil duty of care does, and the HSE's advice to voluntary organisations is to follow the same sensible approach anyway. In practice every insurer will expect it, and a parent whose child was hurt will not be reassured by 'we had no staff'.

The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 add the specific duty to assess risk. If you have five or more employees the significant findings must be written down. Below five it is not a legal requirement to record it, but a written assessment is what your insurer, your venue and, if it comes to it, a court will ask to see.

A risk assessment that fits on two pages

The HSE's own model is five steps: identify the hazards, decide who might be harmed and how, evaluate the risks and decide on precautions, record the significant findings, and review when something changes. For a children's club the hazards are mostly predictable: the floor, the equipment, the doors, the car park at pick-up, the activity itself, the water if there is any, the weather if you are outside, and medical conditions the children arrive with.

Write it for the person who will actually read it on a Saturday morning. A table with four columns (hazard, who is at risk, what we do about it, who checks) beats a twelve-page template copied from a school. The HSE publishes free templates and worked examples; adapt one rather than starting from a blank page.

Do a separate short assessment for anything that is not your normal session: a trip, a competition, a show week, a holiday club in a venue you do not usually use. The risks that catch clubs out are almost always in the unusual week, not the routine one.

Review it at least once a year and whenever something changes: a new venue, a new activity, an incident, a child joining with a condition you have not handled before. Date each version. An undated assessment reads as one nobody has looked at since it was written.

Play is meant to involve some risk

The HSE has a published statement on children's play and leisure that is worth reading in full, because it says the opposite of what many clubs assume: children need challenge and some risk to learn, and the aim of a risk assessment is to weigh benefits against risks, not to remove every possible harm. A gymnastics club that never lets a child fall off a beam is not doing gymnastics.

What the HSE does expect is that the serious, foreseeable hazards are controlled: equipment that is maintained, supervision that matches the activity, and coaches who know the progressions. Bruises and grazes are part of childhood; a trampoline with a missing spring is negligence.

The venue: whose job is what

Most clubs hire a hall, a pool, a pitch or a school sports hall. The venue owner is responsible for the building: fire precautions, fixed wiring, the structure, usually the fixed equipment. You are responsible for how you use it and for anything you bring in. Get the split in writing in the hire agreement, and ask for the venue's own fire risk assessment and evacuation procedure.

Before the first session in any venue, walk it: fire exits unlocked and clear, where the first aid kit and nearest defibrillator are, where the children assemble outside, which doors a five-year-old can open, whether the car park and the entrance mix. Write down what you found and what you did about it. Ten minutes with a notebook is a risk assessment.

Fire safety in England and Wales sits with the 'responsible person' under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, usually the building owner or manager, but a club running sessions has to know the evacuation plan, keep a register that lets you count heads at the assembly point, and make sure exits are not blocked by your kit bags.

First aid: assess, then train

The Health and Safety (First-Aid) Regulations 1981 require employers to provide adequate and appropriate first aid for their employees. The HSE says clearly that employers are not legally required to provide first aid for non-employees, but strongly recommends including them in the assessment. For a kids' club the children are the point, so treat first aid for them as a given.

Do a first aid needs assessment: how many children, what ages, what activity, how far to the nearest A&E, whether sessions run in places with no phone signal. That tells you how many trained people you need and what kind. A paediatric first aid certificate is what most children's activity insurers and national governing bodies expect; Ofsted-registered provision has its own requirements.

Make sure someone trained is present at every session, not just on the staff list. Carry a kit that matches the activity (ice packs for sport, a foil blanket outdoors) and check it each term. Know where the nearest public defibrillator is before you need it.

Recording accidents and RIDDOR

Record every accident and every near miss, however minor, with the date, the child, what happened, what you did and who dealt with it. Tell the parent at collection and note that you did. An accident record is a data protection matter too: it holds health information about a child, so store it securely and keep it only as long as you need it. Insurers commonly ask for records to be kept until a child is 21, because a claim can be brought up to three years after they turn 18.

RIDDOR (the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 2013) is the legal duty to report certain incidents to the HSE. For employees it covers deaths, specified serious injuries and injuries that keep someone off work for more than seven days. For people who are not at work, which includes the children in your club, an accident must be reported if it arises from your work activity and the person is taken directly from the scene to hospital for treatment. The HSE is specific that examinations and diagnostic tests alone are not treatment, so a precautionary trip that finds nothing wrong is not reportable, and neither is a parent taking a child to the GP the next day.

Reports are made online through the HSE's RIDDOR form. If you are unsure whether something is reportable, the HSE's reportable incidents page is precise about the categories, and reporting an incident that turns out not to qualify has never got a club into trouble.

Medical information, allergies and medication

Every child's medical conditions, allergies and emergency contacts should be collected at booking, before the first session, and be available to the coach in the room, not in an office spreadsheet. A register that shows the medical note next to the name is the single most useful piece of health and safety paperwork a club owns.

Ask specifically about asthma, allergies (and whether the child carries an adrenaline auto-injector), epilepsy, diabetes and anything that affects the activity. Ask parents to tell you when something changes; a form filled in two years ago is not current information.

Only administer medication with the parent's written consent, record every dose, and store medication where the right adult can reach it fast and the wrong child cannot. If you serve food, know the fourteen allergens and check the register before the snack goes out; the allergy note is no use if nobody reads it.

Supervision and ratios

There is no single statutory adult-to-child ratio for children's activity clubs. Ofsted-registered provision for under-fives follows the ratios in the Early Years Foundation Stage framework; registered provision for older children must keep ratios 'appropriate'. Outside registration, ratios come from your national governing body (swimming, gymnastics, football and martial arts bodies all publish them), your insurer, and your own risk assessment.

Whatever ratio you set, the register has to prove you met it: who was in the room, which adults, from when to when. Head counts at the start, at transitions (changing rooms, moving between halls, going outside) and at the end are the habit that catches the child who wandered off. Build them into the session plan rather than relying on the coach remembering.

Collection is a supervision risk clubs underrate. Know who is allowed to collect each child, have a password or a named list for anyone unusual, and never release a child to an adult the coach cannot place.

Outdoors, heat, cold and calling a session off

For football academies, forest schools, camps and anything on a field, weather is a hazard in its own right. Write down in advance what makes you cancel or move indoors: lightning within a set distance, a pitch that has frozen, a heat warning, wind that makes a marquee dangerous. A rule decided in the office is easier to apply than one improvised on the touchline with thirty parents watching.

In heat: shade, water breaks on a timer rather than on request, sun cream that parents applied before drop-off and consent to top it up. In cold: kit lists that name gloves and hats, shorter sessions, somewhere warm to retreat to. The HSE's guidance on temperature is written for workplaces but the principles carry.

Tell parents fast when a session is called off. A club that emails every family booked onto a session in one go avoids the worst outcome, which is a child dropped at an empty pitch.

Safeguarding, insurance and the rest of the folder

Health and safety, safeguarding and insurance overlap but are not the same thing. Safeguarding is about protecting children from harm by people; health and safety is about protecting them from the environment and the activity. Both need policies, both need someone named as responsible, and both should sit in the same folder your venue and your insurer can see. Public liability insurance is not a legal requirement but every venue will demand it; employers' liability insurance is a legal requirement the moment you employ anyone.

If you run a holiday club or wraparound care, the Department for Education's code of practice for out-of-school settings sets out the health and safety policies it expects, alongside safeguarding and suitability checks. It is voluntary, but it is the standard local authorities and parents increasingly measure clubs against.

A short operational checklist

A named person responsible for health and safety. A dated, written risk assessment for the normal session and one for anything unusual. A venue walk-round recorded for each venue, with the fire evacuation plan and assembly point. A first aid needs assessment, a trained first aider at every session, a stocked kit. An accident book and a habit of using it. Medical notes and emergency contacts on the register in the room. A ratio you can evidence and head counts at transitions. A collection policy. A weather policy for anything outdoors. Public liability insurance, employers' liability if you employ anyone, and a safeguarding policy next to all of it.

Most of this is a few hours' work once and ten minutes a term to keep current. The clubs that get into trouble are rarely the ones that did not know; they are the ones that wrote it all down in 2019 and never opened the folder again.