What is the most Googled question related to coaching? It is: what skills do you need to be a coach?
The short answer is, there are more strands to being a great sports coach than an ability to dispense technical and tactical advice.
As important as these time-honoured elements are in assisting people on their journey to reaching their full potential, great emphasis must also be given to the physical, psychological, emotional and social needs of the people you coach.
This requires a demonstrable range of coaching skills, behaviours and strategies that help to foster positive environments and build positive relationships with your participants. Only then can a coach hope to fulfil the wants, needs and dreams of the people they coach.
With that in mind, here’s another question for you. What is the first thing that comes to mind when someone mentions Duty to Care?
Chances are, it will be safeguarding.
This is undoubtedly a key strand, but just as great coaching is about so much more than providing sound tactical advice and expert technical instruction, so the term Duty to Care is multifaceted and about so much more than keeping people safe and protected from harm.
Not every coach, however, is aware of the breadth of the Duty to Care ethos.
Duty to Care is actually an umbrella term that encompasses the following areas: Diversity, Inclusion, Physical Well-being, Mental Health and Well-being, Safeguarding, Safe to Practice. All the elements support and complement each other.
And to recognise the importance of education and training in each of these core areas, UK Coaching is offering coaches the opportunity to earn our nationally-recognised Duty to Care Digital Badge, supported by a range of partners, and awarded to those who can demonstrate a thorough knowledge of each Duty to Care theme.
UK Coaching's Head of Coaching and Policy Heather Douglas explains:
Duty of Care is our responsibility to have a Duty to Care. We have changed the wording slightly to Duty to Care to make it more action-focused, as we feel it is important the coaching sector challenges its thinking around the wraparound care it provides those who take part in sport and physical activity.”
A positive chain reaction
UK Coaching prides itself on developing great coaches who transform the lives of individuals and communities to help create a happier and healthier society. It is incumbent on us, therefore, to amplify all the themes under the Duty to Care banner as this will help to equip coaches with an extensive ‘Care package’ that they can draw on during their development and throughout their coaching practice to enable them to look after the people they coach, as well as themselves, effectively and appropriately.
Pause for a second to reflect on the following four words of that previous sentence… as well as themselves.
If coaches are to succeed in supporting people to have a fantastic experience of sport and physical activity and helping them to thrive, then they must be supported to ensure they are happy and have the best experience possible to enable them to thrive in their role too.
Why is this important? Because looking after the people who look after the people sets in motion a positive chain reaction.
To put it another way: to help others, coaches must first help themselves. This statement is rooted in the knowledge that people are more willing to help others and engage in caring behaviours when they feel happy and content themselves.
If you are unhappy, frustrated, physically exhausted or emotionally drained, you will not be able to give the people you coach your best self.
Governing bodies, Active Partnerships and any organisation that employs or deploys coaches has a responsibility to protect its workforce. But it goes further than a moral and legal obligation. Providing support to develop self-care strategies allows coaches to prioritise their own well-being, which then creates a self-reinforcing cycle of virtue and happiness.
When the support principles are carefully aligned to the six pillars of Duty to Care, you create a powerful system of wraparound care – a culture of individualised care management that extends to everyone, from practitioner to parent to participant, without judgement or prejudice.
A Duty to Care for the carer
And bear in mind that, for many coaches who support people to meet their needs and aspirations, they are juggling the multiple roles of sports coach, life coach, friend and confidant, counsellor and role model with the added responsibility of holding down a full-time job!
So, while the coach is looking out for the welfare of their athletes on their journey of self-discovery, who is protecting the coach during their emotional rollercoaster ride?
It is important to emphasise therefore that Duty to Care extends to a duty to care for the carer.
The all-consuming nature of coaching and the physical and mental demands it places on individuals – for whom taking their foot off the gas does not come naturally – means it is imperative that someone has their back too.
Learning journeys: A progress report
Undoubtedly, if belatedly, things are changing for the better.
Sport England is endorsing UK Coaching’s approach to Duty to Care and recommends that all its funded sports bodies who employ and deploy coaches into their programmes undertake essential Duty to Care training and complete the Knowledge Checks to gain their UK Coaching Digital Badge.
Meanwhile, CIMSPA (Chartered Institute for the Management of Sport and Physical Activity) will work with its partners to encourage them to make both equality and diversity training and mental health training a mandatory requirement for deployment for the whole of the sport and physical activity sector’s workforce.
One-stop shop for Duty to Care learning
UK Coaching already has a comprehensive bank of learning solutions in place to cover the five pillars of Duty to Care, and we will be adding to our suite of learning content on our Duty to Care Hub throughout the course of 2023 and beyond.
The learning provides a broader scope to meet the needs of the modern learner and modern workforce beyond current safeguarding regulations.
Our ambition is that the learner journey must be easy and accessible, non-linear, pick and mix at people’s own pace, and must recognise prior learning, so that coaches at different stages of their development and career can build their coaching armour easily,” says Heather.
“This means developing a programme of Duty to Care learning on our website and embedding key principles in the content we design, including the development of six new Knowledge Checks for coaches to gauge their confidence in these five areas quickly and for free.
Looking after our coaches and those they interact with so they don’t crack is a serious issue. But we want to progress the learning journeys of coaches by shining a light on these issues, rather than casting a shadow.”