English table tennis scraps the DBS "supervision exemption" from 1 September 2026: Adults working beside children no longer have a door out of the checking ring

The online webinar opens at 6pm on Tuesday, 29 September and runs for exactly one hour. The host is Kyhl Daly, the designated Designated Safeguarding Officer of Table Tennis England. He will talk through the changes to DBS requirements, what they mean for each person involved in table tennis, and the wider picture of DBS in the sport.

The people who need to hear that talk are not the spectators in the stands. They are the ones whose names never appear on a scoreboard: Club Welfare Officers, members of club and league committees, and the volunteers who stand beside children every training session.

I have sat long enough in sports halls to understand one thing. People remember the backhand loop, but this sport is preserved by things nobody films.

Why a talk about paperwork is worth reading

DBS stands for the Disclosure and Barring Service, the UK government agency responsible for issuing enhanced criminal record checks and maintaining the lists of people barred from working with children and vulnerable adults. In England and Wales, anyone working with children in a role defined as a regulated activity must hold a DBS check before starting the job.

That framework did not grow out of nowhere. It is the product of decades of scandals and public inquiries, in which investigators found that abusers tend to choose organisations with loose procedures to hide inside. In sport, where adults hold enormous power over children, that gap once was an open door.

Previously, English law defined regulated activity with an exception called the supervision exemption. The original idea sounded reasonable: if an adult always works under the eye of another responsible person, a DBS check may not be needed. An assistant coach standing beside the head coach in a group session. A volunteer keeping score under the referee's supervision. A helper arranging chairs and balls, with another adult always in the room.

The problem is that reality does not run on paperwork. A session lasts three hours. The head coach leaves the floor to take a call. The assistant stays alone with a group of children. The supervisor named in the file is in another building. The gap between the wording and the actual room is exactly where danger lives.

The core change: a legal marker from 1 September 2026

From 1 September 2026, the Crime and Policing Act 2026 removed the supervision exemption from the legal definition of Regulated Activity. In other words, supervised roles are now treated exactly like unsupervised ones. A volunteer working with children under another person's supervision must undergo a DBS check just like anyone else.

This is the kind of change we in Vietnam often skim past, because it comes from another country and carries the dry name of a statute. But for someone whose job is to observe, it opens a deeper story about how a sport defines its own responsibility.

I once followed a youth table tennis event in Hanoi, where dozens of children gather in a sports hall every Sunday. The manager took attendance in a paper notebook. No one checked the backgrounds of the adults standing around the children. No one asked where the volunteer coach of the day came from, what he had done, whether he was barred anywhere. The notebook recorded each child's name correctly, but not a single line about the remaining adults in the room.

That comparison is not meant to insult anyone. It simply shows the distance between a system and individual goodwill. Goodwill cannot replace evidence. And children cannot gamble on whether the adult beside them is a good person.

Who is affected, and how

Table Tennis England lists three groups who need to hear this webinar. The first is Club Welfare Officers, the responsible focal points for child safety in each club. The second is members of club or league committees, the people who decide on staffing and process. The third is volunteers who regularly work with children.

For the first group, this change removes a long-standing worry. Previously, a Club Welfare Officer had to judge case by case whether someone fell under the exemption, based on a vague legal definition. One mistake could mean an unsuitable person still gained access to children.

For the second group, it is a resourcing problem. Each DBS check costs time and money. A small club with a few volunteers will feel the pressure. But that cost has to be weighed against something far more expensive: a child harmed in silence and a club that loses all trust.

For the third group, this change erases a grey zone that some people may have exploited. Those who want to reach children usually look for the least-scrutinised route. The supervision exemption, in the wrong hands, was exactly that route.

How Table Tennis England's DBS process works

Table Tennis England says it has its own DBS process and that the role of DBS checks in safeguarding children is the focus of the webinar. Within English table tennis, that process is tied to the recognised club system, where each club must meet child welfare standards to be licensed.

What stands out is how the organisation chose to communicate. It did not build a loud media campaign. It opened a one-hour online webinar, aimed precisely at the people who will have to enforce the change. That is how a system repairs itself: it speaks to the workers, not the audience.

In many years in journalism, I have learned that the most important news often has no catchy headline. It lives in internal notices, in training sessions for volunteers, in documents only insiders read. If you only read the results table, you will never know whether a sport is protecting its people or abandoning them.

The contrarian angle: a certificate does not make a culture

This is where I want to pause a little longer, because the story is easy to tell wrongly.

There is a strong temptation when reading this news: to treat the removal of the supervision exemption as a complete victory, the happy ending of a child-protection story. More checks mean more safety. More paperwork means children are more shielded.

I do not entirely believe that.

I once saw Levi tremble on the big stage. That tremble made the legend. But I have also seen adults calm to the point of being chilling, people with spotless paperwork who knew exactly what to say to organisers. A criminal record check only says that a person has never been caught. It does not say that person will not harm a child on an afternoon when nobody is watching.

DBS is a net, not a wall. It filters out those who have been caught. It does not filter out those who have never been caught, and most abusers fall into the second group.

So the real value of the change on 1 September 2026 does not lie in the certificate. It lies in the fact that the law has removed an excuse. From now on, no one can say they thought they were exempt because someone was supervising. The excuse disappears, and responsibility becomes clearer.

But if clubs simply chase procedure, collecting forms just for the sake of it, and leave everything else untouched, then we have traded one gap for another. Child safety does not live in a filing cabinet. It lives in how far a coach stands from a child, how an adult looks a parent in the eye at handover, how a child knows that if something is wrong, there is someone to tell.

I have spoken about 2026, when tournaments fell silent and the stands stood empty. In 2026, the tournament fell silent. I realised applause does not need a grandstand. But I realised something else too: when the lights go out and the screen goes dark, what remains is how people treat each other when nobody is watching. Safeguarding children is the same. Its most important part always happens in moments with no audience.

Looking at Vietnam: a silence that needs naming

Vietnam's Law on Children 2026, effective from 1 June 2026, clearly sets out children's right to be protected in all forms, including the right to live safely and be protected from violence and abuse. This is an important legal foundation. But between the law and the training floor there is still a long road.

In Vietnamese table tennis, youth clubs and training centres are springing up across major cities. Many are opened by private coaches, with a few dozen students. Others sit inside schools, cultural houses and sports centres. That diverse structure makes imposing a single common standard complicated.

I do not write these lines to criticise. I write because I believe a sport that wants to go far must protect its smallest members before it talks about medals. What English table tennis is doing is a thought-provoking suggestion: they did not wait for an incident to tighten the rules. They tightened first, when no one had yet been harmed.

A good system is one that makes bad things hard to happen, not one that is merely good at handling the aftermath once bad things have happened.

A final promise: write the ending before the body

At 47, the newsroom told me to write what readers wanted. I started writing what they need.

And what table tennis readers need today is not a dry report about a law in a distant country. They need to know that some sports are quietly building fences they cannot even see, so that a child holding a paddle can walk into a gym without worrying about anything but the ball.

From 1 September 2026, in England, there is no longer an excuse called the supervision exemption in law. That is a small story about a statute, and a big story about where adults choose to stand between silence and responsibility.

In Vietnam, the question remains open. When will an attendance book that records only children's names be replaced by one that also records the names of the adults standing around them? When will individual goodwill be supported by a system that does not allow gaps to exist?

The ball still rolls on the table every day. What changes is the person standing beside the table.