Nottinghamshire Orienteering Club

Safeguarding and Welfare

Safeguarding refers to protecting children and other vulnerable people from harms that they cannot be expected to understand or even detect because of their age, ability or life experience.
Welfare refers to providing everyone with a safe enjoyable environment at all orienteering events and during other associated activities.

Everyone has a shared responsibility for welfare and safeguarding to create safe, enjoyable environments in orienteering whether as an orienteer, parent, coach, club official or spectator.

At Nottinghamshire Orienteering Club we want you to feel safe and welcome, and we encourage you to raise any concerns you have or incidents you witness at the earliest opportunity to our Club Welfare Officer or British Orienteering’s Lead Safeguarding Officer.

The club is committed to the principles of Safeguarding Children and Vulnerable Adults and our Club Welfare Officer is happy to give support and advice.

We support and follow British Orienteering’s two Safeguarding Policies, these can be found via the links below:

For further information including resources and training opportunities visit the dedicated page on the British Orienteering website or contact the Lead Safeguarding Officer.

Reporting a concern or an incident

All reports are taken seriously and dealt with in a sensitive manner. Should you wish to report any welfare or safeguarding concern or incident please contact either:

The Club Welfare Officer, Hilary Palmer email
British Orienteering’s Lead Safeguarding Officer, Jeanette Downing (07891 091622) email

This includes any concerns within orienteering or outside of orienteering and any concern over anybody's behaviour related to the welfare of children or adults at risk, including those away from the sport that involves members or participants.

All reports will be logged in confidence with the Lead Safeguarding Officer who will also explain the processes which will be followed depending on each case.

Reporting Forms

In addition to contacting the Club Welfare Officer or Lead Safeguarding Officer, there are forms you can use to report a concern or incident.

British Orienteering Quick Report Form
British Orienteering has a mobile-friendly quick report form which can be used to make immediate reports to the Lead Safeguarding Officer who will follow up with you on completion of the form.

Other Reporting Forms

If you complete one of these forms, it has then to be emailed to either your Club Welfare Officer or the Lead Safeguarding Officer as soon as possible.

If you need any advice on how to complete a form or what you should do if someone reports something to you, this short video will help you.

How the sport provides safeguarding

In addition to the standard safety measures that all orienteering events and activities have, when you bring children orienteering we will help you to ensure their welfare and safety by ensuring that:

The people who run the sport are safe to be with.: Our coaches and officials who have unsupervised regular contact with children and adults at risk have satisfactory Disclosure and Barring Service checks.
We take all reasonable steps to ensure that your children will be safe from other participants and strangers.: Organisers of events and activities carry out risk assessments and have procedures for managing safety in public places.; There have been no reported incidents of children coming to any harm from strangers whilst orienteering.
The challenges set will be manageable so that your children are able to find their way around the course.: Planners of courses and activities follow rules and guidelines to provide courses or activities with different levels of challenge to meet different needs.
Severe injuries are unlikely but if they happen there are qualified people and procedures in place to look after them.: We keep track of every individual at every event or activity to ensure that they are accounted for within expected times.; There are procedures for finding lost children and looking after found children and for providing first aid.
Children’s individual needs will be considered as far as possible within the nature of the sport.: At events, we will explain what physical and navigational skills are needed to complete a course and how we can help with an individual need.
At coaching activities, if you tell us about any special needs we will tell you what adaptations can be made to make our activities accessible.
We expect you to follow our guidelines about which course is appropriate for you or your children to complete. In order to meet our safeguarding and insurance responsibilities, we may refuse to let you do a course if we consider you are taking undue risk.

25 Jul 2025