FROM next April, no one will be allowed to work with children and young people in Scottish football unless they have had a full background check and hold a suitable licence, it was announced yesterday.
The Scottish Youth Football Association (SYFA) told the Health and Sport Committee at Holyrood that from April next year, coaches and officials will only be allowed to work with young players if they have a Protecting Vulnerable Groups (PVG) licence.
The committee began its inquiry after numerous allegations emerged of coaches abusing young football players, with some former coaches now facing criminal trials.
A helpline received more than 100 calls in the weeks after it was set up in November last year, and the focus fell on the SYFA and football’s governing body in Scotland, the Scottish Football Association, after it emerged that more than 2,500 coaches across the country did not have a PVG licence out of a total of 15,000 registered coaches.
In the PVG scheme, Disclosure Scotland carries out criminal record checks on all applicants for the PVG licence and shares the results with individuals and organisations.
Other relevant information can be shared with the employer who is providing regulated work, unless the applicant seeks to have a conviction from their PVG Scheme record. If the information shows the applicant might be unsuitable for regulated work, they’ll be referred for further investigation.
Until now the SYFA has allowed coaches to work with youngsters as long as they have applied for a PVG licence. Even then they can only do so under the supervision of a licence holder. That ‘provisional’ member status is to be stopped from next April.
SYFA chairman John McCrimmond told MSPs that the former three-month period of grace to allow new coaches and officials to apply for a licence has also been scrapped.
He said: “As of August 21, they (coaches) are not allowed to work with children until we have received the forms that they are now in the PVG process.
“At that point, they become a provisional member which allows them to work with the kids providing they are working with and supervised by a PVG holder.
“From April 1, 2018 we’ll be removing that provisional membership, and it will become the situation where they are not allowed to work with kids until such time as we have completed the PVG process on that individual.”
McCrimmon was asked by MSPs why the full check system was not in place already. He replied: “For us to get to where we want to be, we have to make sure we have the infrastructure in place to deliver that. That’s why we are doing this in two stages.
“Stage one is to remove the three months, which we have carried out, and then in April leading into season 18/19 we’ll move directly to having the PVG forms back before allowing membership.”
SFA chief executive Stewart Regan told the Committee: “You’re either approved or you’re not approved, and if you’re not approved you’re not allowed to work with children in the club environment. It’s black and white, and it’s very clear.”
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