Table Tennis England to host September 29 webinar on DBS rule change: from 1 September 2026, supervised roles require a check just like unsupervised ones

On the sign-in desk of almost every youth table tennis session I have ever sat behind, three things sit together: a stack of forms, a box of pens, and a lanyard. The lanyard is the only thing parents never ask about. They ask about fees, about session times, about whether their child will be put on table two. Very few ask the name of the person at the head of the table, the person who will place a hand on their child's wrist for the next forty minutes.

In England, from 1 September 2026, that question has a different legal answer. The Crime and Policing Act 2026 removed the 'supervision exemption' from the legal definition of Regulated Activity. Previously, a volunteer or coach working with children under the supervision of someone else was not required to hold a DBS check. From that date, supervised roles are treated the same as unsupervised ones.

To explain what this means across the club system, Table Tennis England has scheduled an online webinar for 18:00 to 19:00 on Tuesday 29 September, presented by Kyhl Daly, the organisation's Designated Safeguarding Officer.

The webinar is aimed at four groups: Club Welfare Officers, members of club or league committees, volunteers who work regularly with children, and anyone who manages or supports those volunteers. According to the announcement, it will cover the regulatory change and how it affects attendees and the volunteers they work with, Table Tennis England's own DBS processes, the role of the DBS check in safeguarding children in the sport, and a question and answer session.

DBS stands for the Disclosure and Barring Service, which issues criminal record checks in England and Wales. There are three main levels: basic, standard and enhanced. Enhanced checks are used for roles working with children or vulnerable adults, and can include a search of the relevant barred list.

At the centre of this story is the concept of Regulated Activity, a legal category rather than a moral one. Teaching, training, instructing, caring for or supervising children can fall inside it, provided the work is frequent, intensive or overnight. For years, a gap existed under the name 'supervision exemption'. If a person carried out that activity under the supervision of someone who was themselves in Regulated Activity, the supervised person was not considered to be in Regulated Activity. In effect, the presence of a checked adult behind you was enough to exempt you from needing a check yourself.

Table Tennis England has made clear that this reasoning no longer holds. A coaching assistant, a helper with a junior group, a volunteer at the door of a hall, a scoreboard operator: if their work touches children in a way the law defines as Regulated Activity, they now need the appropriate check, regardless of how many other adults are standing nearby.

Why table tennis is unusually sensitive to this change

I have spent countless sessions inside youth training centres, and table tennis compresses the distance between coach and child more than almost any other sport. In football, an under-13 session may have three coaches twenty metres apart. In table tennis, a coach stands half a metre behind a ten-year-old, adjusting an elbow, a wrist, a contact point. The whole session happens indoors, usually with no stands and often with no parents watching.

That structure creates two opposing consequences. On the risk side, a high density of one-to-one interaction in a small private space makes cross-observation harder than in team sports. On the management side, the same density makes role classification messier. Does a seventeen-year-old assistant who feeds balls to an under-11 group for two hours every Wednesday fall inside Regulated Activity? Does a parent who drives four club children to a county event? Does a retiree who keeps score at an under-15 event across nine weekends a season?

Under the old regime, many of those questions could be answered in one short sentence: no, because there is a supervisor present. From 1 September 2026, that sentence disappears.

There is a telling detail in the timing. The webinar takes place on 29 September, twenty-eight days after the new rules took effect. That gap is not an accident. Sports governance always carries a lag between the day a law takes effect and the day a system understands it. That lag is where most unintentional failures are born: clubs keep working to old habits, verifiers keep asking old questions, and nobody deliberately breaks the rules.

Four operational friction points clubs will hit

The first is a surge in paperwork with no change in administrative capacity. A grassroots table tennis club in England typically runs on three to five key volunteers, and the Club Welfare Officer carries the safeguarding responsibility. Previously, the DBS-checked group was relatively narrow: mainly head coaches and committee members. Now it expands to everyone performing Regulated Activity, even alongside others. Files do not create or close themselves. Each one needs identity verification, supporting documents, a countersignatory and status tracking. For a club with forty juniors and twelve volunteers, moving from six files to twelve in a single season doubles an unpaid workload.

The second is the opportunity cost borne by the volunteer. The DBS currently sets a published fee for each standard or enhanced application, and eligible volunteers are exempt from that fee. In cash terms, most table tennis volunteers pay nothing for their check. But the real cost of a file is never money. It is waiting time, an appointment to verify documents, remembering to renew, and doing all of it while volunteering for one reason: a love of the sport. Volunteers do not walk away over eighteen pounds. They walk away over four weeks of waiting, three rounds of resubmitted paperwork and a dry reminder email in their busiest week.

The third is a technical gap affecting assistants under eighteen. This is the question I would put directly to the 29 September webinar. Youth table tennis in England, as in Japan where I grew up and in Shanghai where I work, depends on a very young layer of assistants: sixteen and seventeen year olds skilled enough to lead under-11 groups and close enough in age to be trusted. That system is cheap, technically effective and genuinely educational. When the check requirement extends to them, one legal limit must be stated plainly: a person under eighteen cannot be checked against the children's barred list. That list applies from eighteen upwards. The result is an operational paradox. The seventeen-year-old falls inside the requirement but cannot be checked at the deepest level. On paper the club complies. In practice, the club must compensate with something else: supervision, allocation and a reporting culture.

The fourth is the family exception. The definition of Regulated Activity contains an exemption for activity carried out in a personal or family relationship. A father teaching his daughter to play in the garage does not fall inside it. This is a real theme in table tennis history: many elite players grew up in family-run clubs where parents doubled as coaches and drivers. Tomokazu Harimoto trained from a very young age under family guidance. Mima Ito also grew up in an environment where her mother was her coach. In China, Ma Long began inside the local sports school system, where coaches and dormitories came close to replacing family. The family exception is legally sound, but it creates a grey zone when a family club opens its doors to other people's children. At what moment does a garage session become a class containing children who are not your own? That line is not clear in practice, and it is exactly the kind of question a Club Welfare Officer needs to be equipped to answer.

What commentators miss

Before the ball touched Harimoto's racket, I had already seen him read the match with the back of his neck. That is a habit of observation I learned from years in seats nobody wants. It applies to stories that have nothing to do with a scoreline. In a safeguarding briefing, the most readable things are not on the slides. They are in who sits in the front row, who opens a notebook, who glances at a phone, who nods too quickly. A club that understands safeguarding will produce at least one difficult question during the Q and A. A club that only wants the paperwork signed will stay silent and leave on time.

I will be watching three signals on 29 September. The first is who attends: long-serving Club Welfare Officers alone would suggest a system carried by a small group; a mix of committee members and young coaches would suggest absorption at the right level. The second is whether anyone asks about processing times, because clubs live by the calendar, and a file that arrives two weeks late can keep a volunteer off the table on opening night. The third is whether anyone asks about under-eighteens, because a serious briefing admits the limits of its tools rather than presenting them as complete.

The contrarian angle: when compliance becomes a barrier to entry

Every sport governance reform carries an unspoken assumption: tighter rules make the system safer. That is broadly true, but it ignores one variable: the ability to move between the formal and informal system.

An affiliated table tennis club has obligations, a Club Welfare Officer, reporting procedures, insurance and criminal record checks. An informal group collecting cash at a local community hall has none of it. For years the gap was bridged by a soft competitive advantage: the formal club offers competitions, rankings and a pathway. When compliance costs rise past a certain threshold, some groups will leave the formal system to keep operating, not because they want to hide, but because they do not have enough people to do the paperwork properly.

I call this the narrow door paradox. The narrower the door, the fewer people pass through the front entrance and the more walk around to the side. Children inside the formal system end up better protected. Children outside it lose the only layer of protection they previously had, however thin that layer was.

That is why the 29 September webinar matters more than a rule briefing. If Table Tennis England acknowledges the resourcing problem directly, it has a chance to keep clubs inside the system. If the session stops at explaining the law, it will produce a document that is legally correct and operationally useless.

Paperwork and people

I once counted twenty-three contracts torn up in a single year. Each sheet of paper was an untold story. That was 2026, when the pandemic froze global football and table tennis and I watched youth academies cut ties with eighteen-year-olds within weeks. The lesson holds today: in any crisis of a youth development system, the first thing cut is whatever looks like administrative cost. And the first thing cut is often the thing that protects the child.

A Club Welfare Officer is not a paperwork clerk. That person is who an eleven-year-old can approach when something happens and they do not know who to tell. A criminal record check only confirms that the adult in front of a child is not on a barred list. It does not confirm that the child knows who to find when they need help.

I am fifty-one, and I can still hear the whisper of a rough stone under the mud of an under-15 training hall. That whisper is rarely about technique. It is about whether the child has someone to trust.

How England compares with Japan, China and Vietnam

Youth table tennis in Japan runs mainly through school club and private family-linked club structures, with safeguarding responsibility spread across schools, municipalities and clubs at varying levels of standardisation. In China, sports school and youth training centres operate closer to a semi-residential model, where coaches have deep and frequent access to young athletes and control is largely internal rather than externally verified. In Vietnam, youth table tennis grows mainly through clubs and local talent centres, where families and the direct coach carry enormous influence.

The English model differs in one fundamental way: it relies on an independent, state-run disclosure service and uses federation membership as its compliance lever. That model is verifiable, auditable and scalable. Its price is an administrative burden pushed down to the lowest level.

After twelve years of watching these systems, I have reached an uncomfortable conclusion: systems built on personal relationships produce wildly uneven protection, while systems built on paperwork produce very even protection. That evenness has value. It also has limits.

When the rain falls

If I had to make a time-bound judgement, I would place my bet on an eighteen-month window. In the first three months after the webinar, understanding will rise fast while actual applications rise slowly, as clubs audit their role lists. This is when mistakes are most likely and when a good briefing makes the biggest difference. From month four to month twelve, pressure shifts to processing, as clubs discover the real challenge is maintaining a procedure while the volunteer pool rotates. After eighteen months, two outcomes will coexist: well-run clubs with a strong Club Welfare Officer will pass through at lower cost than expected, while small clubs with few people and a loyal volunteer core will absorb the heaviest losses.

The webinar at 18:00 on 29 September is the starting point of that sequence. Sixty minutes is a very short time for a legal change that touches thousands of people.

The rough stone back then was still caked in dust, and I have waited ten years for the rain. In table tennis safeguarding, the rain did not fall on 1 September 2026 when the law changed, and it will not fall on 29 September when the briefing ends. It falls on the first evening of a new season, when a volunteer stands at the door of a hall and knows exactly what to do next.