English Table Tennis Scraps the Supervision Exemption: Everyone Working With Children Now Needs a DBS Check

From 6pm to 7pm on Tuesday, 29 September 2026, Table Tennis England will run an online webinar led by Kyhl Daly, the governing body's Designated Safeguarding Officer. The session focuses on changes to DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) requirements, what they mean for clubs, leagues and volunteers, and the wider picture of how DBS operates across English table tennis. The most striking marker sits in a single sentence of the announcement: from 1 September 2026, the Crime and Policing Act 2026 removed the “supervision exemption” from the legal definition of Regulated Activity. Before that date, some volunteers and coaches working with children under supervision were not required to hold a DBS check. That provision no longer applies, and supervised roles are now treated the same as unsupervised ones. To grasp the consequences, it helps to see how the British legal framework layers responsibility. The DBS carries out criminal record checks designed to stop people with relevant convictions from reaching vulnerable groups. Not everyone working at a club falls under a mandatory check. Only those inside Regulated Activity must go through the process. Regulated Activity covers teaching, training, caring for or supervising children at a set frequency, for instance once a week or more often, or on four or more days within a thirty-day period. Overnight activity also belongs to that category. The supervision exemption once created a grey zone: where the work took place under the supervision of someone already in Regulated Activity, the supervised person was not placed in the same category. That grey zone has now been closed. Assistant coaches, teaching aides, session helpers and volunteers minding the changing rooms under a head coach's direction must all hold a DBS check if their work with children meets the frequency threshold. The webinar on 29 September 2026 targets three groups: Club Welfare Officers, members of club or league committees, and volunteers who work regularly with children. These are the people who must answer the hardest question inside any club: who among us now falls inside the mandatory check, and who does not? Over one hour, the session explains how the regulatory shift affects individuals and the volunteers they coordinate. Attendees will also be walked through Table Tennis England's DBS processes and the role of criminal record checks in protecting children in the sport. None of the time is set aside for debating whether the new rule is reasonable; the full hour belongs to operational questions. For clubs, the first task is reviewing the personnel list. Every role needs classifying by frequency and by the nature of contact. A coach running a junior table tennis class twice a week falls inside the mandatory group. Someone who appears once a month to help at a tournament may not. That boundary cannot be estimated by feel; it has to be written down and stored. The second task is recalculating check cycles. A DBS certificate does not last forever, and some clubs previously leaned on the exemption gap to postpone paperwork for assistant coaches. That gap closed on 1 September 2026, which means many people are starting the process for the first time, with processing waits and a heavier paper trail attached. The third task is internal communication. Parents who send their children to table tennis classes rarely know which members of the coaching team have been checked. Once the rules change, clubs gain an advantage if they publish the list of checked roles and the process for anyone newly joining. A summer without spectators, yet the data never takes a holiday. July through September is a quiet stretch for tournaments, and it is also when national federations update their regulations. Table Tennis England chose to explain the change almost a month after the law took effect rather than announcing it beforehand. That keeps the information close to reality, but it leaves clubs scrambling inside a fresh season. The real issue lies in the distance between the statute and daily operations. The Crime and Policing Act 2026 alters a legal definition, but the people who determine the quality of child protection are the club secretary filling in the form and the head coach assigning who stands in front of the class. A law only travels as far as the organisational capacity of the smallest club. Watching how national sports federations run their safeguarding machinery over several years, I keep seeing the same pattern: the hardest part is not passing a rule, but convincing volunteers that the procedure belongs to them. In table tennis, where grassroots activity rests largely on non-professionals, that pressure weighs heavier than in most sports. Zoom out and the group-coaching model, with a head coach in charge and assistants supporting, is the norm in many countries, Vietnam included. That is precisely the model the supervision exemption used to shield. Once the exemption disappears, the compliance cost does not land on large academies with administrative staff; it lands on small clubs run by a handful of unpaid people. Put another way, the change reaches beyond administrative paperwork. It shifts the boundary of responsibility from trust towards verification. Barriers exist to test people, not to stop them. A volunteer willing to complete a criminal record check has accepted putting a child's interests ahead of their own comfort. Having hurdled since the age of 15, I know the rules never stand still. For English table tennis, the question worth raising after 29 September 2026 is not whether clubs will comply, but whether they will turn the process into permanent infrastructure or simply chase it until the next announcement arrives.