Code of Conduct

What this document is for

SailCoach puts coaches, children, parents and club volunteers in the same software. Each of those groups has different power, different access and therefore different duties. A single list of "be nice to each other" would be useless to all of them.

So this is four codes in one document. Read the section that applies to you. Read the others if you want to know what you can expect from everybody else.

This sits alongside our Acceptable Use Policy, which governs what you may do with the service itself, and our Safeguarding Policy, which governs concerns about a child's welfare. Where this code and the law disagree, the law wins.

The short version

• Behave as though the sailor and their parent are reading everything you write about them. Often, they can.
• Keep adult-to-child contact on the platform, where it is visible and recorded.
• Never claim a qualification, a check or a status you do not hold.
• Do not share another person's data, notes, footage or analysis.
• If something worries you, tell someone. Do not sit on it and do not investigate it yourself.

For coaches

You have more access to a child's information here than almost anyone outside their family. Notes, feedback, session history, video, medical notes on the day you are running, and a private message channel. That access is the job, and it comes with the duties below.

Professional boundaries with young sailors

• Your relationship with a young sailor is a coaching relationship. Keep it there. No contact that would look odd if a parent read the transcript.
• Do not take a coaching conversation off the platform. Not to a personal phone number, not to WhatsApp, not to Instagram or Snapchat, not to a personal email account. If a sailor messages you on a personal channel, move it back here and tell their parent you have done so.
• Do not meet a young sailor one-to-one in private. Coaching happens in view of other people. Where a genuinely one-to-one session is unavoidable — a private lesson, a long drive to an event — it is agreed in advance with the parent and the club, not arranged between you and the child.
• Never ask a child to keep something from their parents. There is no coaching reason to do it, and it is one of the clearest warning signs there is.
• No gifts, no lifts arranged privately, no social media following of a sailor's personal accounts.
• Hold the boundary even when the child pushes it. Young sailors can become attached to a coach they admire. Managing that kindly and clearly is your responsibility, not theirs.

Keep communication on the platform, and keep it visible

Messages sent through SailCoach are recorded with a timestamp and the sender's IP address and device, and they are checked automatically against a short list of swear words. They are not screened for grooming. We have written a scanner that looks for contact-detail exchange, requests to move to another app and secrecy language; it is not yet applied to messages, and the date we will apply it by is in our Safeguarding Policy. A parent or guardian of a sailor under 18 can read their child's message history at any time.

The record is the protection here, not the scan.

• Use the platform's messaging for coaching communication with a young sailor.
• Assume every message can be read by the sailor's parent, because it can.
• Messages cannot be edited or deleted here. Once you send it, it stays — to the sailor, to their parent, and in our records.
• Where you genuinely need to talk to a child's parent instead of the child, do that.

Be aware of the current limits, honestly stated: the automatic check catches a list of swear words and nothing else, and the platform does not yet notify a parent when a new adult first messages their child. Both of those are gaps we are closing. Neither is a reason to behave differently — but do not assume the software is watching closely enough to catch you being careless. It is not.

Writing a coach note

Coach notes are free text attached to a named child. A note can be shared with the session, or private to a single sailor. What is not obvious from the interface is how far a note can travel: a parent or guardian of a sailor under 18 can read the notes written about their child, reply to them and react to them. A sailor of any age can read notes shared with them.

So the rule is simple.

Write every note as though the sailor and their parent will read it, because they may.

In practice:

• Write about behaviour, not character. "Tacked late at the pin three times" is coaching. "Lazy" is not, and it is the kind of word a thirteen-year-old carries for a long time.
• Be specific enough to act on. A note that cannot be turned into something to try next week is not worth the child's record.
• Keep medical and welfare information out of general coaching notes. There is a place for a medical note, it is access-controlled, and it is the right place. A diagnosis dropped into a session note is a health record sitting in the wrong drawer with the wrong permissions.
• Never record a safeguarding concern in a coach note. It is the wrong channel and the wrong audience — the person the concern is about may be able to read it. Send it to [email protected].
• Do not speculate about a child's home life, mental health or family circumstances in a note. If you are worried, that is a safeguarding report, not a note.
• The same applies to what you draw and type on a video. An arrow with a label is still a written judgement about a named child. See the Image Use Policy.
• Correct a note you got wrong. Editing a note because you were unfair is good practice, not an admission of anything.

Qualifications, DBS and vetting

Never claim a qualification, certification or check you do not hold. This includes implying one — describing yourself as "safeguarding trained" when your certificate lapsed in 2023, or as "DBS checked" when the check was for a different role and has expired.

How verification works here:

• You enter your own tickets — instructor awards, powerboat, first aid, safeguarding, DBS — into your qualification records.
• The club verifies them, not you. The platform will not let you mark your own certificate as verified, and it deliberately voids an existing verification if you later change the substance of the record.
• Expiry is tracked, and a lapsed ticket shows as lapsed.

One thing used to be wrong here and is now fixed. A self-entered "background check" field sat on the coach profile and nobody verified it. It has been removed, and the server rejects it if anything tries to set it — a vetting claim nobody has checked is worse than no claim at all.

One thing is still not right, and it is not the field you would expect. The free-text certifications box on your profile, and the qualifications list on your public coach page, are typed by you and checked by nobody, and neither is displayed with any marker saying so. The verified records below them are the real ones. Put nothing in the free-text fields you could not produce a certificate for. Labelling them honestly is a dated commitment in our Safeguarding Policy.

Your responsibilities:

• Keep your DBS check current at the level your club and the RYA require for your role, and keep your safeguarding certification in date.
• Tell your club immediately if your DBS status changes, if you are subject to an investigation by any club, class association or governing body, or if you are barred or suspended anywhere. This applies whether or not the matter involves SailCoach.
• Do not coach children if your safeguarding certification has lapsed. The platform does not currently block you from doing so — nothing here refuses a coach with no tickets at all. We have committed to making a verified, in-date DBS and safeguarding certificate a requirement before a coach can be assigned to a squad or message a sailor under 18, by 31 December 2026. Until it exists, this is on you and your club.

Reporting a concern, not handling it alone

If something about a child's welfare worries you — something they said, a mark you saw, a change in them, the way another adult is behaving — you report it. You do not investigate it.

• Tell your club's welfare officer or designated safeguarding lead on the day, and email [email protected].
• Do not question the child to get more detail. Poorly handled questioning can make a child's account unusable in a later investigation.
• Do not confront the adult concerned.
• Do not decide it is probably nothing. That judgement is not yours to make alone, and a report that turns out to be nothing costs nobody anything.
• Write down what you saw or heard, in the child's words where you can, with the date and time, as soon as you can.
• If a child is in immediate danger, call 999 first, then tell us.

If the concern is about someone at the child's own club — including a club administrator — send it to [email protected] directly. You do not have to route it through the club first, and you should not if that is where the problem is. Full detail is in the Safeguarding Policy.

For sailors

This section is for you, whether you are eleven or forty. If you are a young sailor, the short version is: treat other people's stuff and other people's feelings the way you would want yours treated.

On the water and off it

• Sail by the rules, and take your penalty when you break one. Everyone hits a mark sometimes. Pretending you did not is the part people remember.
• Protest the incident, not the person. Arguing on the water is part of racing. Making it personal is not.
• Do not bully anyone, in any form. That includes in messages here, in a group chat somewhere else, and in the boat park. It includes leaving someone out on purpose.
• Be decent to the people who make sailing happen — race officers, safety-boat crew, volunteers, your coach, the person on the gate. Almost all of them are unpaid.
• Help someone who has capsized or is in trouble, even if it costs you the race. Always.

Other sailors' data is not yours to share

You can see quite a lot about other people here — session notes shared with you, video from a session you were in, results and analysis.

• Do not screenshot or forward another sailor's notes, feedback, video or performance analysis. Not into a group chat, not onto social media, not to your mates at another club.
• Do not log into someone else's account, and do not ask for their password.
• What is shared with you was shared for your coaching, not for distribution. If you want to show your parent, show them on your screen. If you want to send it to someone, ask the person it is about first.
• If somebody shares another sailor's information with you, do not pass it on. Tell a coach.

Report your results honestly

If you add your own regatta results, those results feed a rating system that estimates how you are progressing against the fleet. It is described in our AI and Automated Decisions Policy.

So an invented finishing position is not a harmless bit of pride. It distorts your own rating, it feeds a comparison against real sailors, and it means the platform tells your coach something untrue about you.

• Enter your real finishing position, your real fleet size and your real event.
• If you make a mistake, fix it or tell your coach. Nobody is in trouble for a typo.
• Do not enter a result for an event you did not sail.
• Padding a record in a system a coach reads is dishonest in the same way that not taking a turn after hitting a mark is dishonest.

If something makes you uncomfortable, tell someone

You do not need to be certain. You do not need proof. You do not need to be able to explain why it feels wrong.

• Tell a parent, your coach, your club's welfare officer, or us at [email protected].
• If it is a message in SailCoach, you can report it. Open the message and use Report. It never goes to the person who sent it. But be told honestly: reporting a message does not yet alert anybody. It is filed for us to look at, and nobody is woken up by it. So if it matters, also tell a parent, your club's welfare officer, or us at [email protected] — that email is read by a person. Or call Childline free on 0800 1111, any time, and it will not show on the phone bill.
• If an adult asks you to keep a secret from your parents, tell someone straight away. That is never okay and it is never your fault.
• If a message from anyone makes you feel uneasy, you do not have to reply.
• Telling someone about another person's behaviour is not telling tales. It is the right thing to do, and nobody will be annoyed with you for it.

There is a version of our privacy information written for young sailors at Privacy for Young Sailors.

For parents and guardians

You have access to your child's account information while they are under 18, and it ends automatically when they turn eighteen. This section is about using that access well, and about how you behave around your child's sailing.

Support, do not pressure

• Sailing is your child's, not yours. Ask them whether they enjoyed it before you ask them where they finished.
• A bad result is not a character flaw. Optimist fleets are large, random and cruel, and a child who is scared of a bad result stops taking the risks that make them better.
• Do not coach from the shore, from a rib, or in the car home. Your child already has a coach, and contradicting them leaves the child stuck between two adults.
• The drive home matters more than you think. It is where most young sailors decide whether they still love it.
• Do not compare your child to other people's children, aloud or in a group chat.
• Let them quit if they want to quit. Plenty come back.

Oversight is for your child's safety, not surveillance of their coaching

The access you have exists so you can see that your child is safe, and so you can be involved in their sailing. It is not there so you can monitor their coach's every word.

• You can read what your child can read — the notes written about them, their messages, their sessions.
• You can never post as your child. The platform refuses this absolutely: a parent account cannot speak as a child in a conversation, in any circumstance. That is deliberate, because a coach has to know who they are talking to. It is also why you should not sign in as your child instead — if you set the account up, the password link came to your address, and using it to speak as them defeats the whole point of the rule.
• Your child should know you can see it. Secret monitoring of a teenager damages trust and, when they discover it, usually ends the honest conversations you actually needed.
• Use it to spot what matters — an adult you do not recognise, a message that reads wrong, a note that upsets them. Not to audit whether the coach said "good" often enough.
• If a coach note about your child seems unfair, raise it with the coach. Notes can be replied to. Most disagreements are a coach expressing something badly, not a coach being wrong.
• As your child gets older, step back. A fifteen-year-old needs a coaching relationship with a bit of room in it.
• Your access ends automatically when your child turns 18. We have no intention of changing that age, and if we ever did we would publish a new version of this code with a new effective date first, and say why.

If you believe a coach has crossed a line, that is not a note reply. That is [email protected].

Touchline behaviour

• Do not shout instructions at your child, or anyone else's, from the shore or a support boat.
• Do not argue with race officials. If you think a decision was wrong, there is a protest procedure and it does not involve the committee-boat crew and a raised voice.
• Do not criticise a coach in front of children, including your own.
• Respect the exclusion zones around the course. A parent's rib in the wrong place has ruined more races than any wind shift.
• Whatever you do at the club, you also do not do in the club WhatsApp group.
• Follow the event's photography rules and do not post other people's children on social media. See the Image Use Policy.

For clubs and squad administrators

You hold the most sensitive combination of access in the platform: children's medical notes, emergency contacts, dates of birth and phone numbers for every member of your club; the ability to verify coaches; and, through message moderation, the content of private conversations including children's.

That is a great deal of trust and it needs to be used narrowly.

Handling medical notes and contact details

• Look at a medical note when you need it to keep a child safe, and not otherwise. Curiosity is not a reason.
• A squad medical note reaches the squad's coaches — not just the one running that day. Add a coach to a squad only when they need that access, and keep the note to what a coach must know on the water. Do not copy it into a session description, a group chat, a spreadsheet or an email.
• Do not photograph the roster, and do not build your own spreadsheet of it. The platform deliberately provides no download of medical information, because a list of children's health notes on a volunteer's laptop is the exact thing this design is avoiding. Do not work around it.
• The member export is not a general-purpose spreadsheet. You can download your club's membership as a CSV. It carries no medical notes, but it does carry every member's name, date of birth, and their parent's name and email address. Export it when you have a reason to, keep it off shared drives and personal devices, and delete it when you are done.
• Keep notes factual and minimal. "Asthma, inhaler in buoyancy aid pocket" is what a coach needs. A diagnosis history is not.
• Contact details are for contacting people about sailing. Not for club fundraising, not for a mailing list, not for handing to a sponsor.
• Tell us fast if you think details have been exposed — a shared login, a lost laptop, a mistaken forward. Email [email protected]. We would far rather hear about it the same day than a month later.

Medical and welfare information is special category data under Article 9 of the UK GDPR. It gets that treatment because getting it wrong hurts a child. Our lawful basis and safeguards are set out in the Privacy Policy.

Verify coach qualifications honestly

When you verify a coach's ticket, you are telling us and the club's coaching staff that you have seen it. Parents cannot see qualification records today — nothing in the product shows them one. That makes your verification the only thing standing behind a coach's claim, not a second opinion on it.

• Look at the actual certificate or check. Not a screenshot of a screenshot, not "I know Dave, he's fine".
• Check the name, the date and the expiry.
• Verify only what you have personally seen. If you cannot see the evidence, leave it unverified. Unverified is an honest state and the platform is designed to show it.
• Re-check when a record changes. The platform voids verification if a coach edits the substance of a ticket; that is a prompt to look again, not a bug to work around.
• Act on lapsed tickets. A lapsed safeguarding certificate or DBS means a conversation, not a reminder that sits there all season. The platform does not currently prevent an uncertified coach from working with children — that enforcement is committed for 31 December 2026 and until then it is yours.
• Never verify your own qualifications, and never verify a ticket for someone who verified yours as a swap.

Do not use the platform's ratings as the sole basis for selection

SailCoach computes a competitive rating for sailors, and can produce a "headroom" verdict suggesting a sailor may be ready for a bigger fleet. Those outputs are statistical, they are derived from race results, and they are advisory.

They must not be the sole basis for squad selection, team picks, event entry decisions or any other decision about a child. This is a binding commitment we have made in our AI and Automated Decisions Policy, and it is a commitment on you as much as on us.

• A human decides. Every time. A person who knows the sailor makes the call and can explain it.
• Interrogate the number before you use it. Where the verdict is "ready", the platform lists the actual events it rests on. It does not yet show the four tests the verdict has to pass, and the statistical workings are shown only on an adult sailor's page — so on a child's page, which is the case this rule is about, you are looking at a headline with less behind it than you might assume. The tests themselves are published in our AI and Automated Decisions Policy, and you can ask us for the workings for any sailor. A rating built on four races in one fleet is not a judgement about a child's ability.
• Do not wire an automatic rule to it, formally or informally. "Everyone who shows READY goes up" is an automated decision about a child dressed as a coach's judgement.
• Ratings do not measure the things selection should care about — attitude, coachability, whether a sailor makes the group better, whether they have had a rough year.
• If a sailor or parent asks why a selection went the way it did, answer with reasons, not with a score.
• Grading levels are awarded by a human here, and must stay that way. Nothing in the platform assigns a level automatically, and nothing should.

Message moderation

Administrators can see reported messages and, through moderation tools, private conversations including those involving children.

Two honest limits before the rules. The moderation queue is scoped to your own club, and a direct conversation started inside the app is not attached to a club — so in practice a reported direct message between two of your members will not appear in your queue at all, and only we can see it. And there is no screen for any of this: the moderation queue is an API, not a page. Do not treat yourself as the safety net for reported messages. Anything that worries you goes to [email protected].

• This is a trust-and-safety function, not a coaching one. Coaches are not moderators and do not get this access.
• Open a conversation because a report or a concern requires it. Never to satisfy curiosity about a coach, a parent or a member.
• What you read there stays there, apart from what you must pass to a welfare officer or a statutory agency.
• If the report concerns someone at your own club — especially someone you know well — hand it to us at [email protected] rather than handling it yourself. You should not be investigating your own friends, your own colleagues, or yourself.

When the code is broken

What happens next depends on what happened, who was affected, and whether a child was involved.

Anything involving a child's safety goes to the Safeguarding Policy first and immediately. It does not wait behind a conduct process, and a serious concern is referred to the police, children's social care or the relevant local authority designated officer regardless of what we do about the account.

Everything else follows the process in our Acceptable Use Policy, which sets out what we may do and in what order. In summary, our responses run from a private word, through a formal warning, restricting features, suspension, and removal of the account, up to reporting to a club, a class association, the RYA or the police.

How we decide:

• Proportionately. A sharp message in a bad moment is not a suspension.
• Quickly where a child may be at risk. We will suspend access first and work out the facts second, and we accept that this will sometimes turn out to have been unnecessary.
• With the person told what is alleged, unless telling them would put someone at risk or prejudice an investigation.
• With a route to challenge it. See Complaints.
• With a record, because a pattern across time is often the only thing that shows a problem.

Clubs make their own decisions about their own members and coaches, and we will share what a club needs to make those decisions where the law allows. Our removing someone from SailCoach does not remove them from a club, and a club removing someone does not automatically remove their account here.

Raising a concern

You can come straight to us. You do not have to raise it with your club first, and you should not if the club is where the concern lies.

You can raise a concern anonymously. It limits what we can do — we may not be able to come back to you for detail, or tell you what happened — but we would rather have the information than the contact details.

We will not penalise anyone for raising a concern in good faith, including a concern that turns out to be mistaken. Retaliating against someone who reported something is itself a breach of this code, and a serious one.

About this code

Innovology Ltd, trading as SailCoach, publishes this code. We are registered in England and Wales, and this code is governed by the law of England and Wales.

We will review it at least once a year, and sooner if something happens that shows it is wrong. Where it describes a protection the software does not yet enforce, we have said so rather than leaving you to assume otherwise, and those gaps are the ones we are working on first.

Suggestions for how to make it better are genuinely welcome at [email protected].