Safeguarding — Ferndown Junior Chess

§1 The club’s commitment

Ferndown Junior Chess exists so that children can learn and enjoy chess in a place where they are safe and feel safe.

The club is run by volunteers. Everyone who helps at a session shares responsibility for the welfare of the children there, and everyone is expected to speak up if something concerns them.

The club will:

take every concern about a child’s safety or wellbeing seriously, and act on it;
make it clear who to speak to, and make that person easy to reach;
be careful about what it publishes about children, and remove anything a parent asks it to remove;
keep this policy up to date, and say plainly when something in it has not yet been settled.

This policy does not describe a large organisation, because Ferndown Junior Chess is not one. It is a small club that meets on Saturday mornings, and the commitments above are ones it can actually keep.

§2 Who is responsible

The club’s safeguarding lead is Graham Morris, who runs the club. One person’s name is on this page so that a parent with a worry knows who to speak to rather than having to guess.

Graham holds a current DBS certificate, obtained directly through the Disclosure and Barring Service.

Holding a DBS certificate and being the safeguarding lead are not the same thing. A DBS check asks whether an adult is cleared to work with children. The safeguarding lead role is about who receives a concern, who decides what to do about it, and who refers it on. Both rest with the same person here, which is the ordinary arrangement in a club of this size — but neither implies the other.

Other volunteers help at sessions. They teach chess and play games with the children. Graham runs every session himself; if he were ever unable to, one of them — who also holds a current DBS certificate — would run it in his place.

Photographs are taken and published by Graham alone. Nobody else at the club photographs a session, and nobody else puts anything on this website.

§3 The policy the club works to

This page is the club’s safeguarding policy. It is written for a small volunteer junior club, and it is built on published guidance rather than invented:

the English Chess Federation’s safeguarding guidance, which sets the standard for chess in England — including its safeguarding policy and its guidance on DBS checks for clubs;
the Child Protection in Sport Unit, which publishes practical guidance for clubs of this size.

The club is not claiming to be covered by the ECF’s own procedures. Graham’s DBS check was obtained directly rather than through the ECF, so the club follows the ECF’s published guidance as good practice rather than as a member body bound by it.

§4 Photographs of children

The club sometimes photographs its sessions, and sometimes puts those photographs on this website. It does that only where a parent has agreed to it.

Agreement is recorded on the club’s registration form, and it asks two separate questions:

whether a photograph of your child may appear on this website;
whether your child may be named alongside it.

They are separate on purpose. Agreeing to one is not agreeing to the other, and where a question has not been answered the club treats the answer as no.

If a photograph includes a child whose parent has not agreed, that photograph is not published. The club will use another picture from the same morning, or none at all.

You can change your mind at any time, and you do not have to give a reason — see §6.

§5 Raising a concern

If you are worried about a child’s safety or wellbeing, please say so. You do not need to be certain, and you do not need to have proof. It is better to raise something that turns out to be nothing than to say nothing about something that matters.

If a child is in immediate danger, call 999. Do not wait for the club.

Otherwise you can raise a concern in person at a Saturday session, by phone on 07913 988386, or by email — the address is on the contact page. You will be listened to, and you will be told what happens next.

If your concern is about the club itself — about the person who runs it, or about someone helping at a session — you do not have to raise it with the club at all. There are two other routes, and you can use either without speaking to anyone here first:

Speak to the duty manager at Ferndown Library, where the club meets. There is a member of library staff on duty during every session.
Call Dorset Council’s Family Support and Advice Line on 01305 228558. They are independent of the club, and you can speak to them whether or not you have raised anything here. Open Monday to Friday 8am to 10pm, and 9am to 10pm at weekends and on bank holidays. For an out-of-hours emergency, call 01305 221000.

§6 Asking for a photograph to be removed

If you want a photograph of your child taken off this website, ask and it will be removed. You do not have to give a reason.

Ask through the contact page, or by any of the routes in §5.

If it is urgent, say so — it will be taken down the same day wherever that is possible. In every case it will be removed within five working days.

Photographs published by this club are stored separately from the website itself, so that removing one genuinely deletes the photograph rather than merely taking it off the page.