Extracurricular Activity Safety
How to ensure your child is safe at clubs, classes, and organised activities outside school hours.
What is this?
Extracurricular activities — from sports and music lessons to scouts, drama, and coding clubs — are a wonderful part of childhood. However, they involve entrusting your child to adults and organisations outside of school. Understanding what safeguarding looks like in these settings helps you choose well and stay alert.
How it works
Most incidents in extracurricular settings arise from inadequate safeguarding policies, insufficient vetting of staff or volunteers, poor supervision ratios, or a culture that discourages children from speaking up. Knowing what good practice looks like makes it easier to spot when something falls short.
Warning signs
In your child's behaviour
- • Reluctance or anxiety about attending a club they previously enjoyed
- • Unexplained changes in mood after sessions
- • Mentioning that an adult behaves differently when parents are not present
Prevention steps
Check safeguarding credentials
Ask whether the organisation has a safeguarding policy, a Designated Safeguarding Lead, and whether all staff and volunteers have current DBS checks. A well-run organisation will be happy to answer these questions.
Know the supervision arrangements
Find out the adult-to-child ratio, whether your child will ever be alone with an adult, and how changing and toilet facilities are managed. Ensure drop-off and collection procedures are clear.
Talk to your child regularly
Ask open-ended questions about their sessions: what they did, who was there, how it made them feel. Let them know they can tell you if anything makes them uncomfortable without fear of losing the activity.
What to do if it happens
- 1Listen to your child calmly and take their concerns seriously, even if they seem minor.
- 2Report concerns to the organisation's DSL and, if appropriate, to the local authority or police.
- 3Do not confront the individual yourself — allow the proper procedures to work.
Related topics
If you need to report this
In immediate danger: call 999. For non-emergency police matters, call 101.
Concerned about a child but it's not an emergency? NSPCC helpline 0808 800 5000. Childline for young people 0800 1111.
This is practical educational content to support families. For case-specific concerns about a child's safety, contact the NSPCC helpline on 0808 800 5000 or your local safeguarding team.
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Last reviewed: 2026-03-29