What sports leaders need to know about the Sports Safeguarding Culture Programme

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast1”. That’s not to say that an organisation’s safeguarding strategy isn’t incredibly important – but a great strategy in an organisation with an unsafe culture will never fully succeed. At a fundamental level, the culture of an organisation has an impact on how people in the organisation behave. This in turn has an impact on how safeguarding is practised - so developing a safer culture is a critical part of safeguarding.

This is why a group of expert organisations came together to develop the Sports Safeguarding Culture Programme2. These expert organisations include the Ann Craft Trust, the NSPCC Child Protection in Sport Unit, the Commonwealth Games Federation, the International Safeguards for Children in Sport, LimeCulture CIC, Management Futures, Mission 89, the Premier League, and UNICEF UK.

This groundbreaking programme specifically targets sports leaders. The culture of an organisation is influenced by everyone who works there, but leaders have a significant role to play in developing and role modelling the culture and establishing agreed behaviours, and they tend to over-index in terms of their impact on culture.  This article explains the key points of the programme and why it is an important consideration for leaders of sports organisations:

• How the programme was developed 
• How the programme is structured and why
  • Step1: What is culture and why is it important?
  • Step 2: Developing Culture through Compliance Audit and Action Plan
  • Step 3: Culture Assessment
  • Step 4: Ongoing reflections and actions on culture
• Who would benefit from undertaking the programme?
• What benefits/outcomes can you expect to see?
• How much does the programme cost?
• How to get further information

The author is a member of UNICEF UK and the coordinator of the expert working group that developed the Sports Safeguarding Culture Programme.