England Scraps the 'Supervision Exemption': A Child-Safeguarding Lesson for Vietnamese Table Tennis

At 6pm on 29 September 2026, Kyhl Daly — Table Tennis England's Designated Safeguarding Officer — will sit in front of a camera to talk about something that has nothing to do with technique. He will not dissect a backhand loop, will not analyse a spin-laden rally. His subject is DBS — the criminal record checks required of anyone working regularly with children.

I once sat in a provincial hall watching a coach teach twelve children with a single paddle whose rubber had already split. Nobody asked what paperwork he held. Nobody asked who he was. That was the moment I understood that the gap between a strong table tennis nation and a young one lies in what happens before the ball bounces, not at the table.

A deserted stand still keeps its old applause. But a child keeps nothing, if the adult standing beside them has never been checked by anyone.

One line of law, a whole system shifting

From 1 September 2026, the United Kingdom's Crime and Policing Act 2026 removed the "supervision exemption" from the legal definition of Regulated Activity. Previously, a volunteer or coach working with children who was always supervised did not require a DBS check. Now they do. Supervised roles are treated exactly like unsupervised ones.

This is a significant shift. It acknowledges that an abuser does not announce whether a camera is in the room. It also acknowledges that a child harmed by a "supervised" adult is harmed exactly as much as when that adult stands alone.

Table Tennis England's online webinar runs from 6pm to 7pm on 29 September 2026, UK time. Registrants will hear Kyhl Daly explain how the regulatory change affects them and the volunteers they work with. They will also learn about the federation's full DBS process, and about the role of that process in safeguarding children in this sport.

The target audience is specific: Club Welfare Officers, members of club or league committees, and people who volunteer regularly with children. In England, that is a named tier of personnel with defined responsibility and periodic training. In Vietnam, that tier barely exists as an official title.

What lies beneath the scoreboard

Vietnamese table tennis has young players improving, national youth tournaments, private academies springing up in Hanoi, Da Nang and Ho Chi Minh City. But child safeguarding in sport mostly stops at a few general clauses in tournament regulations.

I once re-read the entire rulebook of a national youth event. The section on player registration ran to three pages. The section on child protection ran to exactly two lines. Two lines. Meanwhile, a ten-year-old eats and sleeps with the squad for ten straight days, travels with coaches, and shares rooms with adults their parents have never met.

The striking fact sits here: a child staying in an academy dormitory through an entire summer accumulates more than a thousand hours of direct contact with adults — more than the total time they spend at school with certified teachers.

Put another way, a child's table tennis coach may spend more hours with them than their homeroom teacher, while carrying fewer legal obligations than that teacher. This paradox repeats across many developing countries, and it is only resolved when someone has the nerve to raise it in a meeting room.

England did not do this because it is rich. It did it because it has paid a price. Each time a sports federation there tightens DBS rules, behind it usually sits a specific incident, a family broken, a reputation in ruins. The rule is the tip of the iceberg; beneath it lies a collective memory of what was ignored for too long.

Shame at the Russia World Cup taught me that ignorance is a starting point. I once thought child safeguarding was a matter for NGOs, with nothing to do with a table tennis match played over a fifteen-centimetre net. I was wrong, and I only realised it while reading incident reports from this sport in country after country.

The contrarian angle

There is another reading of the change. Making DBS checks mandatory even for supervised roles sounds strict, but its precondition is a criminal records system fast, transparent and fair enough to function. If the machinery is slow, volunteers walk away. If it is cheap and lax, the certificate becomes a ritual of compliance.

In England, a volunteer coaching children may wait weeks for DBS clearance, and if a minor issue from twenty years ago appears in the file, that path can close permanently. That protects children, but it can also push a genuinely committed person out of the hall. The line between protection and exclusion is thinner than many assume.

For Vietnamese table tennis, the lesson lies elsewhere. We are not yet at the point of worrying about an over-rigid checking machine. We are still one stage earlier — the stage of admitting that a title like "club welfare officer" needs to exist, that a one-hour annual safeguarding session needs to happen, that parents have the right to know who is sharing a room with their child on an away trip.

Beyond the ball

I still keep the habit of writing about a long-distance girl before I understood what endurance meant. Back then I picked an athlete who finished seventh in the 10,000 metres, simply because I was curious how she trained. Years later, I realised I had accidentally trained a reflex: always look at the part nobody looks at. Child safeguarding in sport is that part.

Fans may not enter the arena, but the arena never lacks them. Likewise, a child may never have their name remembered on a scoreboard, yet they are still in that hall every day, with an adult nobody has ever checked.

The 29 September webinar lasts just one hour. One hour for a subject that could change how an entire system treats its youngest participants. I wonder: if a table tennis federation somewhere in Southeast Asia held something similar this autumn, how many clubs would send someone — and how many of those would consider it wasted time?

I believe the answer will arrive later than a championship. But it will arrive. The only question is whether we want it to come in the form of a written rule, or in the form of an incident none of us wants to read about in the papers.