Working With Children Checks, Coaching Accreditation and the Records Your Club Has to Keep

Most sports clubs discover their credential problem at the worst possible moment. A coach is about to take a junior session and someone realises nobody has checked whether their clearance is still valid. A committee member goes looking for the first aid certificate and finds a photo of it in a two-year-old email thread. An audit request arrives and the register turns out to be a spreadsheet somebody stopped updating in 2024.

None of this happens because clubs don't care. It happens because credential tracking is genuinely fiddly, the requirements differ depending on where you are, and almost nothing about it is automatic.

What a sports club actually has to keep track of

For most community clubs the list runs something like this:

• Child protection clearances for anyone in a child-related role — coaches, team managers, junior coordinators, and often committee members
• Coaching accreditation, usually issued by the sport's national or state body, with its own levels and renewal cycle
• First aid and CPR certificates, which typically expire faster than anything else on this list
• Officiating and refereeing qualifications, again with their own renewal requirements
• Safeguarding or member protection training, increasingly required by peak bodies as a condition of affiliation

Each of those has a different issuing body, a different expiry period, and a different renewal process. None of them talk to each other.

The problem nobody warns you about: it isn't called the same thing twice

There is no single national working with children check in Australia. Every state and territory runs its own scheme, under its own legislation, with its own name:

• New South Wales — Working with Children Check (WWCC), Office of the Children's Guardian
• Victoria — Working with Children Check
• Queensland — Blue Card, issued by Blue Card Services
• Western Australia — Working with Children Check
• South Australia — Working with Children Check, through the DHS Screening Unit
• Tasmania — Registration to Work with Vulnerable People
• Australian Capital Territory — Working with Vulnerable People (WWVP)
• Northern Territory — Working with Children Clearance, commonly called the Ochre Card

Validity periods differ too, ranging from around two years to five depending on the jurisdiction. Full portability between states is still incomplete, so a coach who moves interstate may need to start again rather than transfer what they hold.

For a single-state club this is manageable. For an association covering a border region, or a club that recruits coaches from interstate, it means tracking several different credential types that all do the same job under different names.

Collecting the number is not the same as being compliant

This is the part most clubs get wrong, and it's worth stating plainly.

Asking a coach to write their check number on a registration form is not compliance. In most jurisdictions the club itself has to be registered as an organisation with the relevant authority, verify the individual's status directly with that authority, and maintain an up-to-date register of who has been verified and when.

A number sitting in a spreadsheet proves only that someone typed a number into a spreadsheet. The verification is a separate act, and the register is a separate obligation.

Four traps that catch clubs mid-season

The clearance expires during the season. It was valid at registration in February. It lapses in July. Unless something is watching the date, nobody notices until it matters.

A junior volunteer turns 18. Under-18s generally aren't eligible for a check, and often aren't required to hold one. The day they turn 18 that changes — mid-season, with no trigger unless someone is tracking birthdays against roles.

A new coach joins after the initial sign-off. The club did its checks properly in pre-season. Then someone steps in to cover in round nine and never goes through the same process.

The first aid certificate quietly lapses. It's usually the shortest-lived credential a club holds, and the easiest to forget because it isn't tied to a registration cycle.

What good tracking actually looks like

The fix isn't a better spreadsheet. It's keeping the credential on the same record as the member, so the club isn't maintaining a parallel system that has to be manually reconciled.

In practice that means each member's profile holds what they actually hold — clearance type and number, accreditation level, first aid expiry — with the expiry date monitored automatically and reminders going out to both the member and the committee before anything lapses. Members upload their own supporting documents, so the register stays current without a volunteer chasing paperwork. And because the credential sits on the live member record, a lapse can do something: flag the member, hold a renewal, or stop a check-in until it's resolved.

That's what credential and certification tracking does in SquadSpot today. Credential types are fully configurable, so a club sets up whatever its sport and jurisdiction actually require rather than picking from a fixed list someone else decided on.

What we're still building, and what we don't do

Two things worth being straight about.

SquadSpot does not verify a clearance with the issuing authority. It stores what you record and monitors the expiry date. The verification step — checking the person's status directly with the state body — remains the club's responsibility, because that's how the schemes are designed. Any platform claiming otherwise is worth asking hard questions about.

Role-based requirements are in active development. Today, credentials are tracked and gated at the individual member level. Being able to say "anyone rostered as a junior coach must hold a current clearance and first aid certificate" — and see a single compliance view across everyone in that role — is the layer we're building next. If that's what your club needs, it's genuinely useful for us to hear, because it shapes what gets built and when.

Where to start

If your club's credential records currently live in a spreadsheet, an email folder, or somebody's memory, the useful first step isn't software. It's writing down which roles at your club require which credentials, and checking when each one expires. Most clubs find at least one surprise in that exercise.

Once you know what you're actually tracking, the question of where to keep it gets much easier to answer. If you'd like a hand thinking it through for your club, get in touch.

This is general information about credential record-keeping, not legal or compliance advice. Requirements differ by state and by sport — confirm your club's obligations with your state authority and your peak body.