Safeguarding Adults in Sport Framework: what NGBs need to know before the January 2027 deadline

If completing the Safeguarding Adults in Sport Framework is a condition of your funding agreement with Sport England, your submission is due by 31 January 2027. The Framework is a self-assessment tool, run by the Ann Craft Trust and endorsed by Sport England and UK Sport, that benchmarks an organisation's safeguarding adults policies, procedures, and practices against a national standard.

For many NGBs, the deadline isn't the hard part. Filling in the Framework is straightforward. Proving what you've filled in is where things get uncomfortable.

What is the Safeguarding Adults in Sport Framework?

The Framework is an online assessment made up of six themed sections. For each one, organisations submit evidence showing where and how they meet the required criteria, then summarise any gaps and set out an action plan to close them. It was introduced to support Sport England's wider Uniting the Movement strategy, and it applies specifically to NGBs, National Specialist Partners, and Active Partnerships that receive Sport England or UK Sport funding, where completing it forms part of the funding agreement.

If your organisation isn't in one of those categories, a related option, the Safeguarding Roadmap for Sports and Activity Organisations, covers similar ground for smaller or unfunded bodies.

Who needs to complete it, and by when?

Since April 2022, completing the Framework has formed part of the funding agreement for NGBs, Active Partnerships, and National Specialist Partners funded by Sport England and UK Sport in England. Booking a submission slot happens up to six months in advance, and slots are limited, so this isn't something to start scoping in December 2026.

Safeguarding requirements vary by nation. In Wales, NGBs funded by Sport Wales are expected to meet the NSPCC Sport Safeguarding Standards. In Northern Ireland, funded NGBs must meet the Sport Northern Ireland safeguarding standards. In Scotland, funded bodies work through sportscotland's own requirements. If your organisation operates across more than one nation, as many British and Home Nations bodies do, you may be juggling more than one standard at once, each with its own evidence requirements.

What does the Framework actually assess?

The assessment is built around six themes, each with specific criteria an organisation must submit evidence against (the full list is published here). Broadly, it's checking for:

• A clear, current safeguarding adults policy and set of procedures
• Evidence that staff, volunteers, and coaches have completed appropriate safeguarding training
• A functioning process for logging, escalating, and reviewing safeguarding concerns
• Governance oversight, including whether your board can demonstrate it understands and reviews safeguarding performance, not just delegates it downward
• A credible action plan for anything not yet fully in place

None of this is about running one good training session. It's about being able to produce, on request, a clear record of who was trained, when, what the policy says, and what happened the last time it was tested.

The gap most NGBs discover

Here's where the Framework tends to surprise people who assumed they were in reasonable shape.

Most sports organisations aren't short on safeguarding intent. They're short on safeguarding evidence. A typical NGB might have:

• Safeguarding training delivered through two or three different providers over the years, with completion records split across spreadsheets, email confirmations, and a training provider's own portal
• DBS checks tracked in a spreadsheet, with renewal dates set as calendar reminders that occasionally get missed
• Safeguarding concerns logged informally, through a phone call, a note, or an email thread, with no consistent record of outcome or follow-up
• No single place a board member could go to answer "can we prove our current safeguarding training coverage across staff and volunteers right now?"

None of this reflects poor safeguarding practice on the ground. It reflects a records and systems problem, not a training problem, and it's exactly the kind of gap the Framework is designed to surface. "We did the training" and "we can prove we did the training, for everyone, on time, with evidence" are two very different things when an auditor is asking.

How eCoach supports Framework readiness

This is a systems gap, so it needs a systems answer, not just another course.

eCoach's Compliance & Credentials block gives NGBs a single place to track DBS status, safeguarding training completion, and policy renewal dates, with automated alerts before anything lapses and audit-ready reporting when it's time to show your working. The Safeguarding & Governance Manager block adds incident logging, structured case workflows, and timestamped evidence trails, plus board-level dashboards that let leadership see safeguarding performance at a glance, rather than requesting a report and waiting.

Because both blocks sit inside the same platform as membership records and volunteer data, none of this needs to be reconciled by hand across separate systems before a submission is due. The evidence the Framework asks for is already sitting in one place, because it was tracked there the whole way through, not assembled retrospectively under deadline pressure.

FAQ