Safeguarding policy

At a glance

Purpose: how FindMeFootball handles concerns about the welfare of a child, and how anybody can report one.

Who this applies to: everyone working on FindMeFootball, and anyone who contacts us with a concern — parents, coaches, club volunteers, organisers, members of the public.

What we are: a website that publishes information about grassroots football events and organisations.

What we are not: an organiser, a club, an employer of anyone who works with children, or a safeguarding authority.

Welfare Officer / Safeguarding Lead: James McCall.

Reporting system owner: Steve Horrigan — the form, the queue, the alerting, the records, the response-time tracking and the fallback.

How to report: immediate danger — 999. Non-emergency police — 101. A concern about a child's welfare — safeguarding@findmefootball.com, or our report-a-concern form.

Response aim: We aim to acknowledge safeguarding or welfare concerns within 2 working days. If something appears urgent or high-risk, we will escalate it as quickly as reasonably possible.

Out of hours: not monitored. We are a small early-stage team, not a 24-hour service. Immediate risk goes to 999, never to us.

Next review: within 12 months, or sooner after any concern or significant change.

1. Safeguarding statement

The welfare of a child is more important than our platform, our listings, our relationships with clubs and our commercial interests. Where those come into conflict, the child comes first, and this policy exists so that nobody has to make that judgement under pressure and alone.

Everybody working on FindMeFootball has a duty to be alert to concerns about a child's welfare, to take every concern seriously however small it seems, and to pass it on promptly. A concern that turns out to be nothing costs a short conversation. A concern nobody passed on can cost far more.

It is not our job to investigate. Our job is to receive, record and refer — and, where the concern is about something on our own website, to act on the listing. We are not a safeguarding authority, we have no investigative powers, and attempting to establish the facts ourselves could contaminate an account, warn an abuser, or leave a child believing the matter is being dealt with when it is not.

2. Scope — what we are, and what we are not

This is the most important section in this policy.

Some organisations that work with children take responsibility for a child while that child is in their care — arranging supervision, checking the adults a child will be with, and providing cover if something goes wrong on the day. FindMeFootball is not one of those organisations, because it never has custody, contact or a relationship with a child. Specifically, and each of these is a statement of fact about how the platform actually works, not an aspiration:

We do not run events. Every event and every organisation listed is run by somebody else, who is responsible for it.

We never meet a child, online or in person. There is no messaging, no chat, no video, no forum, and no way for any user to contact another user through the platform.

We never place or introduce a child to a club, a coach or an adult. We publish information; a parent decides what to do with it.

We employ nobody who works with children, so there is nothing for safer recruitment or DBS checking to attach to. Where anything of ours mentions DBS, it is always about what a club tells the public, never about us.

We hold no data about any child — see 'The data we refuse to hold' below.

Promising oversight we have no mechanism to deliver would be the same failure as a listing that looks verified when it is not. Everything in this policy is scoped to what we can actually do: control what we publish, and handle a concern well when somebody brings us one.

Being a directory does not mean being uninvolved. Three real duties follow from what we publish:

What appears on our pages. We choose what to publish about real clubs and real events. A listing that is wrong, that over-claims, or that carries a child's photograph or an individual's mobile number is our responsibility, not the club's.

Not giving false assurance. A parent who believes we have checked something we have not checked is less safe than one who knows we have not. Every claim we make about verification, checking or affiliation must be true and must state its limits.

Being reachable, and acting when told. A published, monitored route for concerns, and a demonstrable response when one arrives.

A few terms used throughout this policy:

Concern — something that may not be right, based on what somebody has noticed or been told.

Serious concern — a concern suggesting a child may be at risk of significant harm, needing an urgent response.

Welfare Officer / Safeguarding Lead — the person responsible for receiving and managing safeguarding concerns. James McCall.

LADO — Local Authority Designated Officer; the local authority contact for allegations against an adult who works with children.

County FA Designated Safeguarding Officer — the safeguarding lead at the County Football Association a club is affiliated to. The right route for most concerns about a football club's own conduct.

3. Roles and responsibilities

James McCall — Welfare Officer / Safeguarding Lead. Owns welfare and safeguarding oversight: reads concerns, decides what happens to each one, decides whether and where to refer, and approves this policy and any change to it. Named publicly in that role.

Steve Horrigan — reporting system. Owns making the reporting system actually work: the report-a-concern form, the admin queue, the alerting to all three recipients, the records, response-time tracking, and the fallback. Also holds the only administrator login, so in practice performs the recording and the on-platform actions (unpublishing a listing, removing an image) that a decision requires.

FindMeFootball as a platform. Receives, records, and refers or escalates concerns where appropriate. Does not investigate safeguarding matters like an authority.

Organisers, clubs and event hosts. Everyone who lists with us runs their own event and carries their own safeguarding responsibility for it — their welfare officer, their DBS position, their photography policy, their first aid, their County FA affiliation. Nothing we publish transfers any of that to us, and nothing we publish should be read by a parent as us having checked it.

Gaps in this section, stated rather than left to be discovered:

One-person rota on actioning the form queue. Anything emailed to safeguarding@findmefootball.com reaches all three recipients in full, so that route needs nobody. A report submitted through the form is read by all three as well: each alert carries a personal link to that one report, which expires, can be withdrawn and records who opened it. What still needs Steve's login is acting — acknowledging the report, resolving it, or changing a listing — so a form report arriving while he is unavailable is seen but not answered.

No formal safeguarding training has been completed by anyone in a FindMeFootball capacity — see 'Training and competence' below.

No professional safeguarding or data-protection sign-off has been obtained. James is the reviewer for now; whether outside advice is needed is his call to make later.

4. The data we refuse to hold

The strongest safeguarding control available to a platform like ours is the data it never collects, because you cannot leak, lose or misuse what does not exist. These are enforced by the absence of database columns, not by form design.

FindMeFootball never holds a child's name — first, last or otherwise.

We never hold a child's date of birth (age groups are bands, attached to teams and events, never to a person).

We never hold photographs of children.

We never hold any medical, dietary, disability or special-needs information about a child.

We never hold a child's school.

We never hold documents of any kind about a child — no consent forms, no ID, no certificates.

We never hold ability assessments or welfare notes about a named child.

We never hold personal mobile numbers or named individual volunteers for a club — official organisation-level contact details only.

We never hold any child profile stored against a user account.

Parent accounts hold location and search interests only — a postcode, a travel distance, the age groups somebody is searching for. Those describe the parent's search, not their child, and are deletable by the account holder at any time.

Applications on behalf of a child, and any 'Quick Apply' feature, are not built and may not go live without James's explicit approval. No decision about indexing, listing quality or momentum has ever moved that line, and none may.

5. How a concern reaches us

Two routes, and they are not equally instrumented.

The report-a-concern form on our website: your report is written to our system, an alert is sent separately to each of the three named recipients, and we record whether each of them was able to read it. This is our system of record.

Emailing safeguarding@findmefootball.com: your email is forwarded to all three recipients, but is not automatically added to our records — someone has to copy it in by hand.

Contact details on the form are optional. A concern about a child must be reportable by somebody who is frightened of being identified, so anonymous reports are accepted and handled the same way. The cost is that we cannot come back with questions, which the form says plainly.

Never promise confidentiality to anyone reporting a concern about a child, and never promise a child that what they tell you will be kept secret. Explain instead that you may have to share it in order to keep them safe.

6. How we respond — receive, record, refer

Receive. Acknowledge that a report exists. The automatic receipt an emailing reporter gets is not this — it says so in as many words, because otherwise our acknowledgement promise would be met by a robot in two seconds and never by a person.

Record. The report is stored factually and date-stamped. Record what was said, in the reporter's own words where possible, and distinguish clearly between what was observed, what was reported, and what is inference.

Assess. The Welfare Officer decides how urgent and how serious it is. If a child may be at immediate risk, that is a 999 call, made straight away, not a queue item.

Refer. Decide who else needs to know. That may be the police, the local authority's children's services, the NSPCC, the relevant County FA Designated Safeguarding Officer, or the LADO where the concern is an allegation against an adult who works with children. More on how we handle a report is in our privacy notice at /privacy#if-you-report-a-concern.

Act on the platform. Where the concern touches something we publish: unpublish the listing while it is looked at, remove the image, correct the claim, or take a club page out of search results. Acting on a listing is not an alternative to referring — quietly unpublishing a page and telling nobody is the worst available outcome, because it removes the evidence and protects our reputation instead of a child.

Record the outcome, including what was decided, by whom, and why — including a decision to take no further action, which is a decision like any other.

Nobody investigates. We do not interview, we do not confront the subject of a concern, and we do not seek corroboration. If a concern needs establishing, that is a job for an authority with the powers to do it.

If the concern is about one of us: if a concern relates to the Welfare Officer, or it would be inappropriate to report it to him, use one of the external contacts listed in the Appendix below, or see /privacy#if-you-report-a-concern — these need no permission from anyone here and are printed on every public page that carries a reporting route.

7. If somebody discloses something to you

Listen. Stay calm. Do not react in a way that makes them regret speaking.

Do not ask leading questions. Open questions only, and as few as possible — you are not gathering evidence, you are finding out whether somebody is at risk.

Do not promise confidentiality. Explain that you may need to tell somebody in order to keep them safe.

Reassure them that telling you was right.

Write it down as soon as you can, in their words, with the date and time.

Pass it on immediately, using the routes above.

The main categories of abuse are physical, sexual and emotional abuse, and neglect. Bullying, discriminatory abuse and online harm are also harmful and are taken seriously. You are not expected to be able to tell them apart — that is exactly why you pass a concern on rather than assessing it.

8. Records and data protection

Safeguarding records are personal data of the most sensitive kind and are handled under the Data Protection Act 2018 and UK GDPR. Full detail is in our privacy notice at /privacy#if-you-report-a-concern.

Records are factual, not opinion, and date-stamped.

Access is limited to those who need it. In practice that is our administrators, our Welfare Officer, and one safeguarding adviser outside FindMeFootball who holds cover for us while we are getting established. Each of them is sent a personal link to a report when it comes in, and each can read that report in full, including the reporter's name and email address if they gave them.

Alert emails carry nothing the reporter wrote. Not the message, not the category detail, not the reporter's own subject line — only that a report exists and where to read it. This holds for a safeguarding recipient as much as anyone, and it is precisely what makes it acceptable for the alert to reach three inboxes we do not all control.

Records may be shared with safeguarding authorities or the police where there is a serious concern for someone's safety or we are required by law.

We keep them for 7 years from the date of the report, then delete them, unless they are part of an ongoing matter or we are required to keep them longer.

A personal data breach likely to risk individuals is reported to the ICO within the statutory timeframe.

9. Escalation, and when we act without being asked

Escalate immediately, without waiting for a queue or a working day, where:

a child appears to be in immediate danger — 999;

a concern alleges current abuse by a named adult in a football setting;

a concern involves an allegation against someone who works with children, in which case the LADO route applies as well as the County FA;

a listing on our own site carries a child's photograph, a named child, or an individual volunteer's personal mobile number — remove it first, then record it. This is the one case where acting before recording is correct, because the harm is live and public and removal takes seconds.

10. Training and competence — stated honestly

No FindMeFootball-specific safeguarding training has been completed, and this policy does not imply any. What actually exists:

James McCall has completed Level 3 Designated Safeguarding Lead training, holds current FA Safeguarding and FA Welfare Officer certification, and is the Designated Safeguarding Lead for a company that places under-18s. Those certificates are held on file. We name them here because he states them publicly himself: our rule is that we never repeat an accreditation — ours or a club's — unless the person or organisation it belongs to has said it in their own public words, and we never present it as something we have verified.

Nobody else has safeguarding training in a FindMeFootball capacity.

Recommended as our clubs directory grows further: everyone handling reports completes a basic child-protection awareness course, recorded with a date.

11. Review

Reviewed at least annually by the Welfare Officer, and sooner following any concern, any near miss, any change in guidance, or any significant change to what the platform does — in particular before parent applications or any child-facing feature go live, which need their own review and James's explicit approval regardless of this policy.

Weaknesses identified in a review are fixed without delay, and the fix is recorded.

Appendix — key contacts

Child in immediate danger — 999

Police, non-emergency — 101

NSPCC Helpline (adults worried about a child) — 0808 800 5000

NSPCC Whistleblowing Helpline — 0800 028 0285

Childline (for young people) — 0800 1111

Report child abuse to a local council — gov.uk/report-child-abuse-to-local-council

FindMeFootball safeguarding route — safeguarding@findmefootball.com

Welfare Officer / Safeguarding Lead — James McCall

Reporting system owner — Steve Horrigan

County FA Designated Safeguarding Officers are found through the relevant County FA's own website; they are not listed here because they vary by county and a stale list is worse than none.