Bryan Ramsay, a coach at Koryo Panthers in Darlington, recently completed the UK Coaching Duty to Care Digital Badge. Here he tells us more about the course, the benefits to him as a coach, and how it has helped his club and the wider Taekwondo community.

I completed this course recently and it was a great insight into care and being objective in decision making, selection and initial engagement during the running of any club. For myself doing the course has opened many doors into learning for myself.

The ‘five pillars’ of Duty to Care consists of the five following units:

Safeguarding – An area we should all be actively engaging in and actioning. Really this is an update and brain refresher.

Diversity – This follows on from inclusion on the grounds of bias and to be honest I never realised what a huge area of learning this is. I probably spent more time on this pillar than all the others as it is vast and really interesting. I feel I am a better person for engaging in this area. I now look for bias in all aspect of training and selection.

Inclusion – So many areas of this topic are a real eye-opener as it shows us how to allow many individuals to participate in activities at different levels of ability and give them all a positive experience.

Mental health – This pillar is everywhere, from the media and social media, and comes up in conversations a lot. Studying this element has helped me tremendously in understanding the pros and cons of engaging in this area. I want to continue learning about this subject as it highlighted a weakness in my understanding of the diverse levels of mental health.

Well-being – This is a must have for every club. In this pillar I learned to pick out the positives of mental health. By better understanding mental health, issues & problems, and people living with them, has helped me look at how to engage in positive action and dialogue. This can bring about confidence and improve well-being.

After completing this course it has proved to be a gateway to learning more about becoming a more positive person and improving positive self-esteem to impart to others.

And for the club, we can implement many more action focused changes. We can be more understanding and engage with all students coming to our club. Helping students coming to our club take part in physical activity regardless of ethnicity or disability is really important and something to continually improve.

We learned in the course that many more people with disabilities would love to participate in physical activity but feel they would not be accepted at our clubs because we wouldn’t understand their needs. This course can help every club address this issue.

Personally, I would like my club to be accessible to everyone and be able to engage in constructive conversation that has a positive effect on new students and feel we understand their needs straight away, thus inspiring them to be long-term students. This course gives you the basic tools to achieve this.

And there are benefits to British Taekwondo.

Overall at British Taekwondo we are making huge strides to help coaches understand the concepts of bias and mental health, well-being and safeguarding. With the implementation of Welfare Officers at club level we should continue to see improvements in these areas.

The course is an excellent introduction to advance into the world of mental health and inclusion. So if you are a coach that would like to engage a bigger potential, go for it.

We have to make Taekwondo accessible to all.

You can find out more about the ‘five pillars’ of Duty to Care course by visiting the UK Coaching website.

Visit Koryo Panthers Taekwondo on Facebook to find out more about the club.

If you would like to share your Taekwondo story please contact Richard Gottfried, Marketing, Digital & Media Manager via marketing@britishtaekwondo.org or 07706 342156.