The standards for Child Wellbeing and Protection in Sport (CWPS) provide a framework for sports to promote a safe and child-centred culture in both Scottish governing bodies and their clubs. There are eight standards with minimum criteria in each to meet. These set a benchmark for good practice to help ensure children and young people’s rights are realised in an enjoyable and safe space.
Compliance with the standards is a condition of sportscotland investment for all Scottish governing bodies.
> Read the Child Wellbeing and Protection in Sport Standards
The Child Wellbeing and Protection in Sport Tool
The CWPS club tool is a self-assessment and action planning resource for clubs, developed by sportscotland, Children 1st and Scottish governing bodies. It allows you to see how well your club is doing against the CWPS standards. Your club can answer a series of questions to identify areas for development and create an action plan to help you create a positive and safe culture and better safeguard children and young people.
Benefit for clubs
Once the self-assessment is completed your club can see where you sit in relation to the standards through a percentage and traffic light system. You can see the areas that need development, create an action plan and work towards ensuring you have a culture of providing safe spaces for children and young people and promoting their wellbeing. The action plan can be a standing agenda item at your club committee meetings to ensure that it’s not ‘forgotten’ about.
• You can see how well your club is doing against the standards
• You can develop an action plan specific to your clubs needs
• The action plan allows your club to focus on developing areas to meet the all the standards
• The action plan can be used to prioritise the development areas
• The action plan can become a constant item on the committee meeting agenda to keep safeguarding and wellbeing at the forefront
• You can promote to current and potential members that you are a safe and fun club
• The self-assessment tool and action plan can help tailor the support you need from Scottish Gymnastics
How to use the tool
You will need a club email address to sign up to the self-assessment tool. The person who signs up becomes the ‘owner’ of the account. Only three people from your club can sign up to access and complete your club self-assessment so the other two people become ‘contributors’. The safeguarding officer should be included in the discussions and completion of the self-assessment tool, including creating the action plan. We recommend the tool is used by your safeguarding officer, club manager/chair, and head coach.
The self-assessment tool has 67 questions across the eight CWPS standards. It can take between 30 and 90 minutes to complete depending how much discussion you have. You don’t have to complete all the questions in one sitting although it may be better to try to do this. You can save your answers and go back to the self-assessment later. Please note that once a question is answered and saved, you cannot change the original answer. As you create your own action plan, you can add actions and realistic and achievable timescales. You can also go back and update the actions at any time, for example, state they are completed, change timescales.
Information sharing and data
Scottish Gymnastics receives a quarterly report which shows which clubs have signed up to the CWPS tool, what stage they are at in completing the self-assessment questions, and their compliance percentage within each of the standards. Your action plan will not be shared.
Sportscotland can access your self-assessment but not your action plan. Children 1st can access self-assessments but do not know which club has completed it, only that it is a gymnastics club. The system works on a rolling four-year retention of data. If your club does not access your account within a three-year period, your data will be cleared.
Support
Scottish Gymnastics is here to help with the process: we can review and discuss your action plan and tailor support to suit your club’s needs. If you would like further information or support, please email safeguarding@scottishgymnastics.org.
If you have any technical issues using the tool, please email cwps@children1st.org.uk with the following information:
• device being used, including brand
• operating system and version
• browser being used, eg Safari, Chrome
• screenshot of the page when the issue occurs, including the web page address (URL)
• description of what happened before and after the issue appeared
