Insurance for Instructors and Coaches UK: Safeguarding Law, Venue Duties and Claims

Introduction

Personal trainers, yoga and Pilates teachers, dance and martial arts instructors, sports coaches, swimming teachers and archery coaches are usually written about one at a time, as though each needed its own body of insurance knowledge. In practice they share a single legal framework and one commercial problem, and the framework is more useful to know than any amount of discipline-specific detail.

The framework is that none of these occupations is regulated. There is no register, no protected title and no licence to teach. What fills the gap is a combination of general statute, contract and the ordinary law of negligence — and the parts of that combination that actually decide claims are not the parts most instructors have been told about. This guide sets out what the law says, taken from the legislation and the regulator, and then works through what genuinely differs between the eight disciplines.

Two related occupations are deliberately not covered here because their legal position is materially different. Riding instruction can be a licensable activity in its own right and brings animal liability with it; see our Equestrian Instructor Insurance UK guide. Music teaching is not a participant-injury business at all — its exposures are instrument value and working inside pupils' homes — and is covered in our Music Teacher Insurance UK guide.

Key Terms Explained

Regulated Activity (Children)

A defined term in Schedule 4 of the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006. Teaching, training or instructing children can be regulated activity, but only if carried out frequently and not under regular day to day supervision by another person who is themselves engaging in regulated activity.

Prescribed Undertaking

An activity listed in the Schedule to the 2015 Prescribed Undertakings Regulations. Only self-employed people conducting one of these owe the general duty to others under section 3(2) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974.

Common Duty of Care

The duty an occupier owes to visitors under section 2 of the Occupiers' Liability Act 1957: to take such care as is reasonable in all the circumstances to see that the visitor will be reasonably safe in using the premises for the purposes for which they are invited to be there.

Specified Waters

A term from the Adventure Activities Licensing Regulations 2004. The sea, tidal waters, inland waters where any part is more than 50 metres from the nearest land, or inland waters made turbulent by weirs, rapids, waterfalls or fast-flowing currents.

Participation Statement

A written acknowledgement by a participant that an activity carries inherent risk. Evidentially useful; not a substitute for reasonable care, and not an automatic defence.

Care, Custody and Control

A common public liability exclusion for property in the insured's charge. Relevant to instructors who hold equipment, instruments or personal items belonging to participants or venues.

The Safeguarding Test That Decides Your DBS Position

Almost every instructor knows the phrase "DBS check". Far fewer know the test that decides whether they are eligible for one, and the test is set out in statute rather than in club policy.

Schedule 4, paragraph 2(1)(a) of the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006 lists, as an activity capable of being regulated activity relating to children:

"any form of teaching, training or instruction of children, unless the teaching, training or instruction is merely incidental to teaching, training or instruction of persons who are not children"

That covers every discipline in this guide. A netball coach, a swimming teacher, a Pilates instructor running a junior class and an archery coach at a youth club are all doing the same thing in the eyes of that paragraph.

The Frequency Condition

Paragraph 1(1) then adds the qualifier that most summaries omit. The activity is regulated activity only if it "is carried out frequently by the same person or the period condition is satisfied". A one-off taster session is not the same as a weekly junior class, and the statute treats them differently.

The Supervision Carve-Out, Which Decides Most Real Cases

Paragraph 2(3A) is the provision that actually separates instructors into two groups:

"Sub-paragraph (1)(a) does not include any form of teaching, training or instruction of children which is, on a regular basis, subject to the day to day supervision of another person who is engaging in regulated activity relating to children."

Paragraph 2(3C) explains that day to day supervision means such supervision as is reasonable in all the circumstances for the purpose of protecting the children concerned.

The practical effect is a clean split. An instructor who runs their own children's classes, sets their own sessions and is answerable to nobody on the poolside or the mat is doing regulated activity. An assistant coach who works every week under a lead coach who is themselves in regulated activity may well not be. The discipline is irrelevant to that analysis; the supervision arrangement is everything.

The Health and Safety Duty That Stopped Applying in 2015

This is the single most misunderstood point in the sector, and it changed more than a decade ago.

Section 3(1) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 places a duty on every employer to conduct their undertaking so that persons not in their employment are not exposed to risks to health or safety, so far as is reasonably practicable. That is unchanged and it plainly catches a coaching business with staff.

Section 3(2) placed a parallel duty on the self-employed. It no longer reads that way. The Deregulation Act 2015, section 1(2), inserted the words "who conducts an undertaking of a prescribed description" with effect from 1 October 2015. Since that date the subsection reads:

"It shall be the duty of every self-employed person who conducts an undertaking of a prescribed description to conduct the undertaking in such a way as to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, that he and other persons (not being his employees) who may be affected thereby are not thereby exposed to risks to their health or safety."

What Is Prescribed

The Schedule to the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 (General Duties of Self-Employed Persons) (Prescribed Undertakings) Regulations 2015 sets out the complete list. There are six entries: agriculture including forestry; asbestos; construction; gas; genetically modified organisms; and railways.

Instruction, coaching and teaching appear nowhere in it. A genuinely self-employed personal trainer, dance teacher or swimming instructor with no employees is outside section 3(2).

What That Does Not Mean

It does not mean the work is unregulated in any practical sense, and reading it that way would be a serious mistake. Three things remain entirely intact.

The ordinary law of negligence is untouched. A participant injured by careless instruction sues in negligence, and the absence of a statutory duty is no defence to that claim. If anything, it focuses the case more tightly on what a reasonably competent instructor in that discipline would have done.

The moment you employ anyone — an assistant, a cover instructor, a weekend helper — section 2 of the 1974 Act applies to you as an employer in respect of that person, and section 3(1) applies in respect of everyone else. The exemption is for the sole operator, and it evaporates with the first hire.

And the occupier's duty under the 1957 Act, discussed next, is a separate statutory scheme that the Deregulation Act did not touch at all.

Adventure Activities Licensing: What It Covers, and What It Does Not

A recurring worry among coaches in the more physical disciplines is whether they need an adventure activities licence. For everyone in this guide the answer is no, and it is worth knowing exactly why, because the scheme's boundaries are narrower and stranger than most people expect.

Regulation 2(1) of the Adventure Activities Licensing Regulations 2004 defines four groups, and only four. HSE, which administers the scheme, sets them out as follows.

A licence is needed by anyone providing an in-scope activity, in return for payment, to young people under 18.

The Consequences Worth Stating Plainly

Archery is not licensable. It appears in none of the four groups. An archery coach running junior sessions for payment does not need an adventure activities licence, and never has under this scheme.

Pool swimming is not licensable either. The watersports group is defined by craft on specified waters. A swimming pool is neither. Open-water swim coaching is a more nuanced question — the water may well be specified water — but swimming itself is not one of the listed craft-based activities.

Climbing walls are exempt in terms, along with abseiling towers and ropes courses, which surprises people who assume indoor climbing is the most obviously licensable thing on the list.

Teaching in Someone Else's Venue

Most instructors in this guide do not own the space they teach in. They hire a studio, a hall, a pitch, a lane or a court. That arrangement creates the most commonly misunderstood boundary in the sector: what the venue is responsible for, and what you are.

The Occupiers' Liability Act 1957 answers it. Section 2(2) sets the common duty of care owed by an occupier to visitors — reasonable care to see that the visitor will be reasonably safe in using the premises for the purposes for which they are invited to be there. That is the venue's duty, and it is about the premises.

The Sentence That Puts the Teaching Risk on You

Section 2(3)(b) then provides that in determining what care is reasonable, the circumstances include the degree of care that would ordinarily be looked for in such a visitor, so that in proper cases:

"an occupier may expect that a person, in the exercise of his calling, will appreciate and guard against any special risks ordinarily incident to it, so far as the occupier leaves him free to do so."

You are the person exercising a calling. The special risks ordinarily incident to teaching your discipline are yours to appreciate and guard against. The leisure centre is not expected to know that a particular Pilates progression is unsuitable for a client with a disc injury, or that a particular sparring drill is inappropriate for a beginner. That is your professional territory, and the statute says so.

This is the answer to the question instructors ask most often: if I teach at a gym, am I covered by the gym's insurance? Not for your teaching. The gym's cover addresses the state of its premises. Your cover addresses your instruction. That is why the gym asks for your certificate.

Children Are Treated Differently by the Statute

Section 2(3)(a) says an occupier "must be prepared for children to be less careful than adults". Where you are the occupier — running sessions at your own studio, or hiring a space in a way that makes you the occupier of it for the session — that raises the standard, not because of anything in your governing body's handbook but because of the Act.

Why a Signed Waiver Is Not the End of the Argument

Section 2(4)(a) is blunt about warnings. Where damage is caused by a danger of which the visitor had been warned, the warning "is not to be treated without more as absolving the occupier from liability, unless in all the circumstances it was enough to enable the visitor to be reasonably safe".

Section 2(5) does say the common duty imposes no obligation in respect of risks willingly accepted by the visitor — but adds that whether a risk was so accepted is decided on the same principles as in other duty of care cases. Participation statements and health questionnaires are genuinely valuable, and the evidence section below explains why. They are not a shield you can hold up in place of reasonable care.

Compulsory, Contractual and Optional Cover

Separating these three categories is the most useful thing an instructor can do before buying anything, because the sector is full of people paying for cover they believe is legally required and going without cover that a contract actually obliges them to hold.

The One Genuinely Compulsory Cover

Section 1 of the Employers' Liability (Compulsory Insurance) Act 1969 requires that every employer carrying on any business in Great Britain "shall insure, and maintain insurance, under one or more approved policies with an authorised insurer or insurers" against liability for bodily injury or disease sustained by employees arising out of and in the course of their employment.

Regulation 3(1) of the Employers' Liability (Compulsory Insurance) Regulations 1998 fixes the amount at not less than £5 million in aggregate in respect of a claim arising out of any one occurrence, together with the costs and expenses of that claim. Most insurers offer more as standard, but £5 million is the statutory floor rather than a market convention.

"Authorised insurer" means one with permission under Part 4A of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 — a practical reason to check FCA authorisation before buying from an unfamiliar provider. Our Employers' Liability Insurance UK guide covers the duty in full.

The Sole Operator Gap

An instructor with no employees has no employers' liability duty. That also means that if they are injured — a torn shoulder demonstrating a lift, a fall from the poolside — no employers' liability policy responds, because they are nobody's employee. Public liability protects other people from you; it does not protect you from your own work. Personal accident cover is the product that addresses that gap, and it is routinely overlooked by people whose entire income depends on being physically able to teach.

Public Liability and Professional Indemnity: Where the Line Falls

Both covers are described in almost identical terms across the sector, which is unhelpful, because the distinction that matters is not what went wrong but when the allegation crystallises and what it says about your judgement.

Public liability responds to injury or property damage arising from your activity. It is characteristically an event: something happened, in a session, at a time and place that everyone agrees on.

Professional indemnity responds to an allegation that the instruction itself was wrong — the programme, the progression, the adjustment, the advice. It is characteristically a judgement being challenged, often weeks or months later, and often without a single identifiable incident at all.

That last row is the reason instructors who genuinely only ever teach group classes with no individual programming still tend to need both. The moment you correct someone's position with your hands, you have combined an event with a professional judgement.

Equipment and Property: What Liability Cover Never Touches

Liability insurance protects other people from you. It does nothing for your own assets, and several disciplines here carry more capital than the instructor realises.

Your Own Equipment

Reformers, mats, bows, targets, weights, sound systems, mirrors, portable barres and lane ropes are business contents. Standard contents cover is often written at a specified premises — which is a poor fit for a trade whose equipment lives in a car boot and moves between three venues a week.

Equipment in Vehicles

Kit left in a vehicle overnight is a frequent exclusion or a heavily conditioned extension, commonly requiring the vehicle to be locked and sometimes alarmed or garaged. Instructors who load out the night before a 7am class should read that condition rather than assume it.

Property Belonging to Other People

This is where the care, custody and control exclusion bites. Public liability wordings typically exclude property in your charge. If you store a participant's equipment, hold a venue's key, or borrow a club's apparatus, that property may sit outside your public liability cover precisely because you were responsible for it.

Hired Venues and Their Contents

Damage to the hired space itself — a scuffed sprung floor, a cracked mirror, a stained mat store — is another common gap. Hire agreements routinely make the hirer responsible for damage during the booking, and that contractual liability is not automatically the same thing as legal liability for accidental damage under a public liability policy.

Swimming Instruction

Swimming is the discipline in this guide where the difference between an injury and a fatality is smallest, and that changes the insurance conversation before anything else is considered.

There Is No Swimming Pool Statute

HSE states the position directly: there are no specific health and safety laws for swimming pools. Operators comply with their general duties under the 1974 Act and the associated regulations. HSE also states that "the law does not state what safety measures an operator must put in place" and that such judgements must be made by each operator based on the particular risks in their pool.

The well-known HSE publication Health and safety in swimming pools (HSG179) is guidance, not law. It applies to pools used by the public for water-related activities and, by HSE's own account, does not apply to swimming in open water that is not maintained as a swimming facility.

Two Widely Believed Rules That Do Not Exist

HSE states that it does not approve any lifeguard training courses, and that health and safety law does not require any particular training course or qualification for lifeguards — though they must be competent, and a current qualification from an appropriate national body is a recognised way of demonstrating that.

HSE also states that the law imposes no specific restrictions on the number of young children a single adult can take swimming, and that operators should reach that decision through risk assessment considering the pool tank, the environment, staffing and, where possible, the children's swimming ability.

Neither of those is an invitation to lower standards. Both matter because instructors sometimes assume a legal rule is doing work that is actually being done by the operator's risk assessment — and when a claim comes, the risk assessment is what will be examined.

Where Your Duty Ends and the Operator's Begins

This is the section 2(3)(b) point in its sharpest form. The pool operator is responsible for the water, the plant, the surrounds and the lifeguarding regime. You are responsible for the teaching: the class size you accepted, the ability grouping, whether the drill suited the swimmer, whether you kept eyes on the group. A leisure centre's insurance will not answer a claim that a teacher put a non-swimmer in the deep end.

Archery Coaching

Archery's insurance profile is shaped by one fact that gets stated wrongly more often than any other in this guide: it is not a licensable adventure activity.

The Licensing Myth

As set out above, the Adventure Activities Licensing Regulations 2004 cover caving, climbing, trekking and watersports. Archery is in none of them. A coach running paid junior sessions does not need an adventure activities licence for archery. Coaches sometimes believe otherwise, and occasionally pay for compliance advice on a scheme that does not apply to them.

What Actually Drives the Risk

The controlling exposure is not the bow but the range: overshoot distance, backstop adequacy, lateral safety margins and who else can enter the area while shooting is live. An arrow that leaves the intended area is the claim that ends careers, and it is almost always a question about the range layout and the control of access rather than about coaching technique.

Hiring the Range Out Makes You the Occupier

Coaches who let a field, hall or range to a third party for their own session — a corporate group, a scout troop, a birthday party — move from being an instructor to being an occupier for that period. Section 2 of the Occupiers' Liability Act 1957 then applies to them directly, including the requirement to be prepared for children to be less careful than adults. That is a genuinely different insurance question from teaching, and it needs declaring.

Martial Arts Instruction

Martial arts is the only discipline here in which participants deliberately strike one another, and that puts an unusual question at the centre of the cover: when does consented contact stop being consented?

The Consent Boundary

A student who agrees to controlled sparring has accepted a category of contact. They have not accepted contact outside the agreed rules, contact at a level inappropriate to their grade, or being paired with someone substantially heavier or more experienced without warning. Claims in this discipline tend to turn on the gap between the contact that was consented to and the contact that occurred — and on whether the instructor's pairing and supervision decisions were reasonable.

That is why liability policies for martial arts frequently address the rules under which contact takes place, and why departing from a governing body's competition or grading rules can matter to a claim even where the departure was well-intentioned.

Grading and Progression

Grading is a professional judgement with a physical consequence: it determines who is deemed ready for harder contact. An allegation that a student was graded or paired beyond their competence is closer to a professional indemnity claim than a public liability one, even though the injury itself looks like an ordinary training accident.

The Supervision Carve-Out in Practice

Martial arts clubs commonly run on senior students assisting with junior classes. That is exactly the situation paragraph 2(3A) of the 2006 Act was written for. Whether those assistants are in regulated activity depends on whether the supervision is genuine and regular, and clubs that treat "assisting" as an automatic exemption without asking that question are making an assumption the statute does not support.

Pilates Instruction

Pilates is unusual in this group because its defining feature — apparatus — is simultaneously a substantial property asset and a mechanism of injury. Very few of the other disciplines carry that double exposure.

Apparatus as Property

A studio reformer is a significant capital item, and a studio may hold several. Springs, straps, boxes, towers and chairs represent real replacement cost. Where an instructor rents space in someone else's studio and uses the studio's apparatus, damage to that equipment engages the care, custody and control question directly: it is not your property, it is in your charge, and standard public liability commonly excludes exactly that.

Apparatus as a Mechanism of Injury

The same equipment introduces spring tension, moving carriages and load paths that a mat class does not. Maintenance and inspection records therefore matter here in a way they do not for most floor-based disciplines, because a claim can allege equipment failure rather than instruction error — and the two are defended completely differently.

Teaching Clients With Existing Injuries

Pilates attracts a high proportion of clients arriving with a diagnosis, often after physiotherapy, and frequently with an expectation that the instructor will work around it. That is the clearest professional indemnity exposure in this guide: the allegation is not that something happened in the session but that the programme was inappropriate for a condition the instructor had been told about.

Personal Training

Personal training is where the professional indemnity exposure is most likely to be underestimated, because the product is a programme rather than a class.

The Programme Is the Product

A group instructor delivers a session. A personal trainer typically designs a progression over weeks, and often prescribes work the client does unsupervised between sessions. Both the design and the unsupervised element are professional judgements, and a claim about either arrives without a single incident to point at.

Working Self-Employed Inside a Gym

This arrangement is the sector norm and it produces a specific gap. The gym is the occupier and holds cover for its premises and equipment. The trainer is self-employed, so — as established above — falls outside the section 3(2) duty. The gym's policy addresses the gym; the trainer's teaching is the trainer's own risk. Trainers sometimes read the gym's insurance as covering them because they work there, which confuses a place of work with an insured relationship.

Online and Remote Delivery

Programming delivered by video or app removes the trainer's ability to see form and intervene, while leaving the professional judgement about programme design entirely intact. That combination shifts the balance further toward professional indemnity, and some policies written for in-person training do not contemplate it at all.

Dance Teaching

Dance teaching is ordinary participant-injury territory for most of the year, and then periodically becomes something else entirely.

Shows Turn a Teacher Into an Event Organiser

A recital or competition changes the risk in several directions at once. There is a different venue, often a theatre rather than a studio. There is an audience, which introduces members of the public who are not participants. There is rigging, lighting, staging and a get-in and get-out. And there is usually a hire agreement that transfers responsibilities to the hirer for the day.

A policy arranged for teaching classes in a hall may not contemplate any of it. This is the clearest example in the guide of an activity that falls outside a declared trade description without the instructor noticing, because it feels like an extension of the teaching rather than a different undertaking.

Children in Performance

Performances involving children can engage separate local authority requirements around child performance. This guide has not verified that framework at source and does not summarise it. Treat it as a question to put to your local authority before a show rather than a matter your insurance arrangements will resolve.

Floors and Footwear

Dance is one of the few disciplines where the surface itself is a recurring feature of claims. Sprung versus solid floors, surface treatment, and whether the venue's floor was suitable for the style being taught are live questions — and, under section 2(3)(b), an occupier may expect a dance teacher to appreciate exactly that kind of special risk.

Sports Coaching

Sports coaching is the discipline in which the club relationship, rather than the activity, determines most of the insurance position.

Club-Affiliated Versus Independent

A coach working within an affiliated club may be covered by a governing body or club scheme for club activity — and not for anything else. Private sessions, holiday camps, one-to-one coaching and work for a second club frequently sit outside it. The most common gap in this discipline is not an absence of cover but a coach assuming that one policy follows them across every context in which they coach.

Where the Supervision Carve-Out Actually Lands

Because coaching is so often structured around lead coaches, assistants and volunteers, paragraph 2(3A) of the 2006 Act does more work here than anywhere else. A volunteer assistant supervised week in, week out by a lead coach engaging in regulated activity may fall outside regulated activity themselves. A coach who takes their own age group unsupervised does not. Clubs need to be able to say which is which, per person.

Employers' Liability and Volunteers

Clubs that use volunteers should not assume that "volunteer" answers the employers' liability question. The 1969 Act attaches to employees, and whether someone is an employee is decided by the working relationship rather than by whether they are paid. Our Employers' Liability and Volunteer Cover for Charities UK guide covers the analysis. For club-level rather than coach-level cover, see Sports Club Insurance UK.

Yoga Teaching

Yoga sits at the low-equipment, high-contact end of the group: almost no apparatus, and a teaching tradition built around physically adjusting people.

Hands-On Adjustment

Adjustment is the discipline's characteristic exposure, and it is the clearest everyday example of the event-and-judgement overlap described above. The contact is an event. The decision to adjust that student, in that posture, at that point in their practice, is a professional judgement. A claim arising from an adjustment can plausibly be framed either way, which is why teachers who rely solely on public liability are exposed on the side that is more likely to be alleged.

Consent practice — asking, offering opt-outs, using consent cards — is not merely etiquette. It is the evidence that the contact fell within what the student accepted, and section 2(5) of the 1957 Act makes the scope of acceptance a live legal question rather than a courtesy.

Venue Range Is Unusually Wide

Yoga is taught in dedicated studios, village halls, gyms, offices, parks, retreat centres and online, often by the same teacher in the same week. Each has a different occupier, a different hire agreement and sometimes a different insurance requirement. Outdoor and online classes in particular are frequently outside a policy written around studio teaching, and both should be declared explicitly rather than assumed to travel with it.

Evidence That Decides an Instruction Claim

Instruction claims are unusual in that the central question is almost never "what happened" — that is usually agreed — but "was the instruction reasonable". That is decided on records, and records either exist on the day or they do not.

The Health Screening You Actually Acted On

A completed health questionnaire proves you asked. It does not prove you responded. The defensible record is the one that shows what the participant disclosed and what you changed as a result — the regression you offered, the exercise you removed, the referral you suggested. A file full of forms with no evidence of response can read as a box-ticking exercise rather than a professional judgement.

Session Notes on the Day

Contemporaneous notes carry materially more weight than a reconstruction produced months later when a letter arrives. For one-to-one work this is straightforward. For group classes, a short register with any incident or modification noted against a name is enough.

Consent for Physical Contact

Where you adjust, correct or spot, record that consent was sought and what form it took. Section 2(5) of the 1957 Act makes the scope of what the participant accepted a legal question, and the person best placed to evidence it is you.

Qualification and Insurance Currency

Keep dated evidence of your qualification, any governing-body membership and your certificate of insurance for the period in which you taught — not merely the current one. Claims arrive late, and the question is what you held at the time, not what you hold now.

Equipment Inspection Records

For apparatus-based disciplines, dated inspection and maintenance records separate an equipment-failure allegation from an instruction allegation. Without them, a defensible equipment claim can drift into being argued as a supervision failure instead.

The Venue Agreement

Keep the hire agreement for the session in question. When a dispute arises about who was responsible for the surface, the access, the temperature or the lifeguard, that document is usually the first thing anyone asks for.

A Decision Framework Before You Take a Booking

1. Establish whether you will be teaching children, and how often. That, plus the supervision arrangement, decides your position under Schedule 4 of the 2006 Act — not the discipline.
2. Identify who the occupier is for the session. Read the hire agreement for exclusive-control wording. If control passes to you, so does more of the section 2 duty.
3. Check the activity against your declared trade description. Shows, camps, outdoor sessions, online delivery, range hire and one-to-one work are each capable of sitting outside a policy arranged for ordinary classes.
4. Confirm the minimum public liability limit the venue requires, in writing. It is contractual, it is enforceable, and it is frequently higher than instructors expect.
5. Decide whether you are exposed on programme as well as on session. If you design progressions, prescribe unsupervised work, adjust people physically or advise on injuries, you are.
6. Ask whether anyone is working for you. The moment the answer is yes, employers' liability becomes a legal duty and the sole-operator analysis stops applying.
7. Set your records up before the first session. Screening, consent, register and incident notes cannot be retrofitted after an allegation.

Claim Scenarios

Explanatory scenarios illustrating the distinctions above. They are not reports of specific cases.

Frequently Asked Questions About Instructor and Coach Insurance

References and Editorial Standards

Primary sources read directly for this guide

• Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006, Schedule 4, paragraphs 1 and 2 — read at legislation.gov.uk. Source for the definition of regulated activity relating to children, the inclusion of "any form of teaching, training or instruction of children" at paragraph 2(1)(a), the frequency condition at paragraph 1(1), the day to day supervision exclusion at paragraph 2(3A) and the meaning of day to day supervision at paragraph 2(3C).
• Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, section 3 — read at legislation.gov.uk. Source for the employer's duty to non-employees at section 3(1) and for the amended text of section 3(2), including the words "who conducts an undertaking of a prescribed description" inserted by the Deregulation Act 2015, section 1(2), in force 1 October 2015.
• The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 (General Duties of Self-Employed Persons) (Prescribed Undertakings) Regulations 2015 (SI 2015/1583), Schedule — read at legislation.gov.uk. Source for the complete list of six prescribed activities: agriculture including forestry, asbestos, construction, gas, genetically modified organisms and railways.
• The Adventure Activities Licensing Regulations 2004 (SI 2004/1309), regulation 2(1), as set out by HSE as the licensing regulator. Source for the four licensable groups, the express exemption of climbing walls, abseiling towers and ropes courses, the inclusion of horse trekking over qualifying terrain, and the definition of specified waters.
• Occupiers' Liability Act 1957, section 2 — read at legislation.gov.uk. Source for the common duty of care at section 2(2), the expectation that children will be less careful at section 2(3)(a), the exercise-of-calling provision at section 2(3)(b), the treatment of warnings at section 2(4)(a) and risks willingly accepted at section 2(5).
• Employers' Liability (Compulsory Insurance) Act 1969, section 1, and the Employers' Liability (Compulsory Insurance) Regulations 1998 (SI 1998/2573), regulation 3 — read at legislation.gov.uk. Source for the compulsory duty and for the minimum amount of not less than £5 million in aggregate for any one occurrence plus costs.
• HSE, swimming pool safety management — the regulator's own published position. Source for the statements that there are no specific health and safety laws for swimming pools, that the law does not state what safety measures an operator must put in place, that HSE approves no lifeguard training courses and that the law imposes no specific restrictions on the number of young children one adult may take swimming, and for the status and scope of HSG179 as guidance.

Statements about insurance policy terms — declared trade descriptions, care custody and control exclusions, claims-made professional indemnity, equipment-in-vehicle conditions and venue-mandated minimum limits — describe general market practice observed across UK instructor and coach policies. They are not universal and no specific insurer's wording is described. Where this guide says wordings vary, that is a statement of fact rather than a hedge.

Requirements around child performance licensing are referred to in the dance section only as a matter to check with a local authority. That framework has not been verified at source for this edition and is deliberately not summarised here.

Conclusion

Eight disciplines, one framework, and four things worth carrying away from it.

Your DBS position is decided by frequency and supervision under Schedule 4 of the 2006 Act, not by which sport you teach. The self-employed health and safety duty under section 3(2) of the 1974 Act stopped applying to instruction on 1 October 2015, which changes how a claim is framed but not whether you can be sued. Adventure activities licensing covers four groups and archery and pool swimming are in none of them. And when you teach in someone else's venue, section 2(3)(b) of the 1957 Act entitles that venue to expect you to appreciate the risks ordinarily incident to your calling — which is the whole reason your certificate, not theirs, is the one that answers a teaching claim.

Of everything here, the single most useful action is to read your own declared trade description against what you actually did last month. Shows, camps, outdoor sessions, online delivery, one-to-one work and range hire all sit outside policies written for ordinary classes, and the gap is almost always discovered at claim stage rather than at renewal.

Next Steps

• Establish, per person, whether your teaching of children is under genuine day to day supervision.
• Read your venue hire agreements for exclusive-control wording and for the minimum liability limit required.
• Check whether you are exposed on programme design as well as on session delivery.
• Confirm every activity you actually run is inside your declared trade description.
• If anyone works for you in any capacity, resolve whether they are an employee.
• Set up screening, consent and incident records before your next new participant, not after.