Table Tennis England's Quiet Revolution: Every Child-Facing Role Needs a DBS Check from September 1, 2026

At 18:00 on September 29, 2026, hundreds of table tennis clubs in England will not turn on their practice hall lights. Instead, they will open their computers and join a one-hour online webinar. There is no ball on the table, no score, no audience. Yet for people working in child safeguarding, this is the most important match of the season. The ball is not moving, but the game is still running. The webinar is organized by Table Tennis England and presented by Kyhl Daly, the Designated Safeguarding Officer of the governing body. The content revolves around a change that sounds administrative but reaches every club: the new rules around the Disclosure and Barring Service, known as DBS. To outsiders, DBS is simply a criminal record check. For the English table tennis system, DBS is the first shield preventing people with a history of offences against children from entering the training hall. The webinar is not aimed at national team players. Its audience is Club Welfare Officers, club and league committee members, and volunteers who regularly work with children. To understand why 2026 is a milestone, one must look at the legal definition of Regulated Activity. This term describes activity involving regular contact with children or vulnerable people, meaning it is subject to mandatory DBS checks. Before September 1, 2026, the law still contained an exemption known as the supervision exemption: a volunteer or coach working with children, while under the supervision of someone who already held a DBS check, was not legally required to hold their own DBS check. The logic of the old rule was that the risk was covered by the supervisor; if the supervisor had been checked and remained in the room, the newcomer did not yet need to be checked. This is where I remember the principle that has stayed with me through 32 years of observing sport. People look at where the ball goes. I look at where the ball does not go. The training hall is where the ball moves; the corridors, the changing rooms, the duty rosters and the volunteer lists are where a child's safety is really decided. England's new regulation is shifting the gaze to that invisible space. From September 1, 2026, the Crime and Policing Act 2026 removes the supervision exemption from the legal definition of Regulated Activity. A coach or volunteer who works with children, whether or not they are in a room with a supervisor, now falls within regulated activity. Supervised and unsupervised roles are treated in the same way. This is not a legal technicality. It reflects a new safeguarding philosophy: instead of asking who is standing next to the child, it asks who could have access to the child. In the past, the system trusted the supervisor. Now, the system is forced to trust the recruitment process from the front door. A training hall does not only need coaches with good technical knowledge; it needs people who are not on the barred list from working with children. Anyone who has worked in youth table tennis can imagine the groups affected. A small club often depends on parents who come to watch their children train, help pick up balls, keep score, or look after children while the head coach is teaching another group. Previously, if those parents worked under the supervision of someone with a DBS check, they did not need one. From the 2026-2027 season, that idea no longer applies. The challenge for Club Welfare Officers is therefore clearer than ever. They must review the whole list of people who come into contact with children, identify who already has a DBS check, who is waiting for a result, and who has not started the process. They need to understand Table Tennis England's DBS process: application, identity verification, barred list check, and record keeping. They also need to explain to parents and volunteers that a DBS check is not a personal suspicion but a standard for the whole system. From an organisational perspective, Table Tennis England is right to hold this webinar about one month after the law came into force. If the governing body had only sent an email, many clubs would not grasp the consequences in time. A one-hour online session allows clubs to ask direct questions about specific situations. Kyhl Daly is not merely talking about application forms; he must also communicate a cultural message: safeguarding belongs to everyone, not only to one welfare officer. I am especially interested in the phrase wider information about DBS in table tennis in the announcement. That detail shows the governing body does not treat the webinar as a place to read the law aloud. They want to build long-term capacity: what should happen when a club discovers that someone without a DBS check has been coaching? Who is responsible when a new volunteer arrives before their check is complete? Without clear answers, a well-written policy can become an extra burden on people who already give up their weekends. It is also necessary to say something against the current. Widening the scope of checks is essential, but who pays the cost and who absorbs the shortage of volunteers? For a national governing body, this is a statistical issue. For a community club in a small town, it is the question of whether enough people can run the sessions. Some parents can only help once a week. If they are forced to complete a long application process, they may walk away. The person walking away is not a bad person; they simply do not have the time. This is the implementation blind spot that many child protection policies face. People often measure success by the number of DBS checks issued, but they do not measure the number of volunteers who have left the system. A training hall without enough helpers may have to cancel a session. A cancelled session does not cause immediate danger, but it erodes parents' trust and reduces a child's opportunity to play sport. Protecting children cannot be separated from keeping the sport accessible. I learned a lesson at the 2026 World Cup that I still use when reading every situation. When I mispronounced Kim Young-gwon's name live on air, I thought the problem was only pronunciation. Only after reviewing the footage did I see that my mistake came from not checking the source. Reviewing the footage is not about finding fault; it is about finding the reason why we did not see the fault. With the new DBS rules, clubs must likewise review their existing arrangements, not to identify the wrong person, but to identify roles that have never been questioned. In a table tennis club, the roles without a ball are often forgotten. The person who organises transport, the person who watches the changing room area, the person at the drinks counter, the person taking photos after a session. If they have regular contact with children, they also fall under the checking requirement. Do not wait for an incident to ask why that person was there. The question must be asked before the person walks through the door. After the webinar, every club should hold its own short meeting, attended by committee members, coaches and a parent representative. Write down every role, compare it with the names of current volunteers, mark who already holds a DBS check, who needs to renew, and who must stop contact with children until the check is complete. A simple spreadsheet can be more useful than a long written document. For Vietnamese table tennis, the story from England is not entirely unfamiliar. Our system does not yet have DBS, but if we wait for a perfect law before acting, we will fall another cycle behind. Youth table tennis centres can start by building minimum safeguarding procedures: coaches' background declarations, codes of conduct, the principle that an adult should not be alone with a child in a closed room, and a clear complaint procedure. It does not need to be a copy of England; it needs to be a net woven from real local conditions. What I want to stress is not the DBS certificate. What I want to stress is the attitude of the system. A child who arrives at a table tennis club cannot protect themselves. They trust that the adult in front of them is a good person. We as adults know that trust must be verified, not by words, but by process. The ball may not move during the webinar on September 29, but the real match is being played on those sign-in sheets and rosters. English table tennis is entering a season in which the line between the training hall and the corridor has been erased. From now on, every adult who stands close to children must prove that they deserve that position. The remaining question is not who will comply, but whether small clubs have enough resources to comply without losing their best volunteers. Some will look at the number of approved checks and call it success. I will look at the place where the ball does not travel: sessions still running, children still playing in a safe environment, and the adults behind them fully vetted. That match has no spectators, but it deserves our attention more than any final.