Safety & safeguarding
The records that matter most, never paywalled
If your club works with under-18s, someone has to know who has a current DBS check and safeguarding training, and make sure nobody uncleared ends up in front of children. Alongside that register sits emergency lookup: a member's emergency contacts and medical information, on a phone, in seconds, when something has gone wrong on the water.
The checks read real records, not just the register.
Mark a course or rota as involving under-18s and anyone without verified, in-date DBS and training is flagged as you assign them. Because the check reads the person's own record, somebody you forgot to add to the register is still caught where it matters.
Cleared for a role is not cleared for juniors.
Someone whose role needs only a DBS shows as cleared for that role, and is still flagged on junior work, because working with under-18s always needs both a check and training. Getting that distinction wrong is exactly how clubs come unstuck.
It chases the expiries so nobody has to remember.
Every night Sail checks the register and tells the people with safeguarding access about anything expired or expiring within ninety days. It doesn't nag twice for the same thing, but it does speak up again if the situation worsens.
What the club has to be able to prove
- Say which roles need which checks: every club starts with a sensible set of roles, and for each you say whether it needs a DBS check, safeguarding training, or both. An instructor might need both, safety boat crew a DBS, a race officer neither
- Keep a register with one live status each: cleared, expiring soon, awaiting verification, action required, or no checks needed. Sail also spots people doing regulated activity who aren't on the register yet and offers to add them in a click
- Record the actual certificates: entered by an administrator, or uploaded by members and staff from their portal. A self-upload always shows as awaiting verification and counts for nothing until someone with safeguarding access has opened it and confirmed it
- Warn rather than block: there are legitimate edge cases and the decision belongs to a human, but nobody is ever assigned to junior work unknowingly
- Handle junior members' consents: guardians and parental consents alongside the rest, with health declarations recorded by the family themselves
- Put emergency information where it's needed: a fast search of current members opening straight onto emergency contacts with tap-to-call numbers and their medical declaration, built for the moment on the slipway rather than a filing cabinet in the office
- Leave the member in control: they record their own medical declaration and choose which staff groups can see it, or delete it entirely, so the club isn't holding health data nobody agreed to share
- Keep certificates private: DBS and training documents are stored privately and open inside the app for the person themselves and those with safeguarding access, never as a public link
- Stay out of the way of clubs that don't need it: safeguarding is dormant until first used, so a club with no junior activity sees a clean app and nobody is prompted for a DBS
Who safeguarding helps the most
Welfare Officer or safeguarding lead
No more a spreadsheet, good intentions, and hoping somebody remembered.
Training Centre Principal
No more checking clearance after the instructor has been assigned.
Duty officer
No more junior rotas built without knowing who is cleared.
Race Officer
No more hunting for a member's allergies when minutes matter.
Safety crew
No more carrying a paper list of emergency contacts, or none at all.
Commodore or Chair
No more carrying the club's duty of care on paper and memory.
Safety and safeguarding are included in
- Essentialsincluded
- Clubincluded
- Club Proincluded
- Never paywalled, on principle: these records are in every plan at every price.
- Club adds the ability to grant the safeguarding area to a welfare officer without making them a full administrator.
The Sail difference
These records are for authorised humans: access control, not intelligence, is the feature, and SailAI is deliberately kept away from safeguarding and medical data. Nor does any of this replace your club's safeguarding policy or your governing body's requirements. It is how you deliver them: the register watched, the expiries chased, the certificates verified, and a warning at the moment a decision is being made.
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