BMABA Updates & News

Hi there,

Our Child Safeguarding in Martial Arts course has been formally endorsed by CIMSPA, the chartered professional body for the UK sport and physical activity sector, against the Safeguarding and Protecting Children professional standard. It's our first CIMSPA endorsement and carries 3 CIMSPA CPD points.

An independent moderator reviewed the course in full and it passed on all five criteria with no actions required.

Already completed it? You don't need to retake anything. The course was endorsed exactly as it stands, and your certificate now carries the CIMSPA Endorsed mark and 3 CPD points. Re-download it from the course page.

Not done it yet? It's available now at the same link. Around three hours, self-paced, with a short multiple-choice assessment at the end.

This is the first of many. We'll be submitting further CPD from the library for endorsement straight away, and we'll let you know as each one comes through. Thank you to Helen for handling the submission, and to everyone who's completed the course so far.

Read the full post; https://community.mybmaba.org.uk/c/bmaba-hq/child-safeguarding-in-martial-arts-is-now-cimspa-endorsed

Hi there,

On Monday morning, we’re launching one of the biggest updates we’ve made to MyBMABA in a long time: the new integrated MyBMABA Hub.

We’ve spent many months looking closely at how clubs actually manage membership, teams, compliance, insurance, DBS and PVG checks, CPD and day-to-day administration, and rebuilding the experience around that.

Whether you’re a solo instructor or managing multiple clubs and a larger team, the new Hub brings everything together into one place. You’ll be able to move between clubs without constantly logging in and out, give lead instructors and management accounts greater oversight, and see your team’s compliance much more clearly.

You’ll also have far more control directly from the Hub, including updating grades, managing insurance and teaching status, progressing assistants into instructor roles, purchasing additional spaces and tracking DBS or PVG applications.

We’ve added some clever automation too. If you or somebody in your team has completed BMABA training, the Hub can check our training records and automatically verify the relevant compliance requirement, without you needing to download a certificate only to upload it again.

Purchases and changes made through the Hub are connected directly to your account, so where something can safely happen automatically, it will.

You don’t need to do anything ahead of the launch. When you log into MyBMABA next week, you’ll see a refreshed main experience and, for account management, be taken into the new fully integrated Hub.

We’re really excited to share it with you.

Read the full announcement here:
https://community.mybmaba.org.uk/c/bmaba-hq/launching-monday-the-new-integrated-mybmaba-hub

Hi there,

We're incredibly proud to share that BMABA is now a signatory of the Armed Forces Covenant: our public pledge that those who serve, and those who have served, are treated fairly and supported properly in everything we do.

Martial arts has always had a special relationship with the Forces community, and we already support a huge number of serving personnel and veterans across our membership, including discounted membership and insurance for current Armed Forces members and all veterans.

Signing the Covenant is about going further. Serving personnel will soon benefit from a free deployment pause on their membership, meaning anyone deployed in service of their country can step away, serve, and come home to an active membership that hasn't lost them a single day, even beyond the usual twelve-month term. Behind the scenes, we're building a veteran-trained, veteran-ready team so that support for the Forces community runs through everything we do.

And this September we launch Reboot, our new community programme helping martial arts clubs become a welcoming sanctuary for veterans and those returning from service, with trauma-informed coaching embedded in how they work.

We'll also shortly begin working towards the Armed Forces Covenant's Employer Recognition Scheme, because this commitment applies to our own team too.

To those who serve, and those who have served: thank you. We're proud to stand with you. 🥋

Hi there,

We're delighted to share that BMABA CIC has been formally awarded ISO 27001:2022 certification for Information Security Management, assessed by the British Assessment Bureau under UKAS accreditation and achieved with zero non-conformities.

In practical terms, it means the way we protect your data, from membership records and licensing through to safeguarding information, has now been independently certified against the world's leading information security standard. It builds on the ISO 9001 quality management certification we've held since May last year, and remarkably, the whole journey took just six months from a standing start in February. Huge credit to our team for their professionalism throughout.

One more thing: we deliberately held back a raft of development work while the audit was under way.

That's now unlocked, so expect a busy few months of releases and improvements across the platform.

Read the full announcement on our blog here.

Hi there,

It's here. After months of development and one of the most requested additions to membership we've ever had, the Instructor & Cadet Training Pathway is now live for all BMABA clubs.

For years, the same question has landed in our inbox in a hundred different forms: "I've got a brilliant assistant. How do I turn them into an instructor properly?"

Until now, the honest answer was that the sector didn't really have one. Martial arts has never had a consistent, structured, safeguarding-led route from the mats to the front of the class. Talented assistants and young leaders were developed on instinct and goodwill, with no shared framework, no recorded evidence of their journey, and no recognised standard at the end of it.

The ITP changes that. And crucially, it does it without taking the development of your people out of your hands.

What is the ITP?

The Instructor & Cadet Training Pathway is a structured development route that takes assistant instructors and young cadets from supervised support roles through to recognised, qualified instructor status, all under the supervision of an experienced lead instructor at their club.

It brings together everything a developing instructor needs in one place.

A defensible national standard. We set the minimum requirements at every stage. That baseline is standardised, indexed and quality-assured, so an ITP stage completed in one club means the same thing in any other. It's a national benchmark clubs can stand behind with parents, venues, insurers and anyone else who asks.

A clear, staged progression. No more guesswork. Learners move through defined stages with transparent expectations at each step, so both the learner and their supervising instructor always know where they are and what comes next.

Supervised, evidenced development. Every learner is linked to a supervising instructor, and progress is logged against their record. When someone completes the pathway, there's a full evidence trail behind the certificate, not just a handshake.

Integrated CPD. The pathway draws on our growing library of CPD courses, from safeguarding and first aid awareness through to coaching children and young people, curriculum design and trauma-informed practice, so learners build genuine underpinning knowledge as they develop practically.

A safeguarding-first cadet route. The cadet strand is designed specifically for young people developing leadership skills within their club, built around age-appropriate expectations and the supervision and safeguarding standards you'd expect from us as a professional standards body.

Your club, your pathway

Here's the part we're most proud of: the ITP is club-driven by design.

Our minimum standards are exactly that, a minimum. They exist to guarantee a consistent, defensible national baseline. Everything above that line belongs to the club.

Want your pathway to be tougher than the national standard? Raise the bar. Clubs can build more challenging, more rigorous in-house programmes on top of the base requirements, so your ITP can reflect the standards your club is known for.

Clubs can also add their own custom CPD requirements to the pathway. Dedicated in-house courses. Competition experience. Club events. Specific training milestones. Whatever development looks like in your dojo, gym or hall, you can build it into the pathway and track it in exactly the same indexed, professional way as the national requirements.

The result is the best of both worlds: a standardised, quality-assured system for tracking instructor development, wrapped around a programme that stays personal, bespoke and 'on the mats'. Driven by you, not by us. We provide the framework and the floor. You decide what excellence looks like at your club.

Why it matters

We support a workforce of more than 6,500 instructors and coaches across 200+ disciplines, and one thing is true in every single one of them: the next generation of instructors is already in the room. They're the assistant holding pads on a Tuesday night. They're the teenager who stays behind to help pack the mats away.

What they've been missing is a road. The ITP gives them one, and it gives clubs a way to develop their own people to a recognised national standard without inventing a framework from scratch, and without sacrificing what makes their club's approach their own.

For clubs, that means succession planning stops being a worry and starts being a process. For assistants and cadets, it means their commitment is finally visible, recorded and recognised. And for parents and students, it means the person stepping up to teach has demonstrably earned it.

How to get started

The ITP lives inside MyBMABA, our member portal.

Clubs and lead instructors: log in to MyBMABA and you'll find the ITP under Flagship Programmes, or head directly to mybmaba.org.uk/portal/itp. From there you can enrol learners, assign a supervising instructor, customise your club's requirements and track progression across your whole team.

Built with you, as always

Like everything we build, the ITP exists because our members asked for it, shaped it and tested it. It's been designed to work in real clubs, run by real people, on real training nights. This is version one, and it will keep growing, so if you have feedback once you're using it, we genuinely want to hear it.

Read the full release here; https://mybmaba.org.uk/introducing-the-instructor-cadet-training-pathway-itp/

Hi there,

Extreme heat this week: managing your classes safely

The Met Office has issued an Amber Extreme Heat warning across Monday to Thursday for much of southern and central England and Wales, now upgraded to a Red Extreme Heat warning from 09:00 Wednesday to 21:00 Thursday. Temperatures are forecast to peak at 38 to 39°C on Wednesday and Thursday, with high humidity and overnight temperatures staying above 20°C. UKHSA heat-health alerts are also in place. This is a serious weather event, and we are asking all clubs to treat it as one.

Children and young people come first. They heat up faster than adults, regulate temperature less efficiently, and often will not recognise or report when they are struggling. Watch closely for flushed skin, dizziness, headache, nausea and unusual quietness, and stop the session for that child immediately if you see it. If a junior venue cannot be kept reasonably cool, the safest decision is to cancel or postpone. No grading, milestone or attendance target is worth a child's wellbeing.

You are fully within your rights to cancel this week, and for many clubs that will be the responsible choice, particularly on Wednesday and Thursday. Where you decide a session can go ahead safely, adapt it: shorten it, move it out of the hottest part of the day, lower the intensity, cut conditioning and sparring, and build in frequent water breaks. If a grading falls this week, please postpone it, split the most demanding elements onto a cooler date, or adjust the format rather than pushing through in dangerous conditions. A short delay protects your members and does not undermine the integrity of the grade.

The duty of care for any session sits with you as the instructor running it, so where you are in doubt, err on the side of caution and record the decision you made. Cancelling for a genuine safety risk is exactly the judgement we expect of BMABA coaches, and it will not count against you. Read the full guidance for detailed advice on managing heat in classes, supporting vulnerable members, and handling gradings and cancellations.

Click here to read the full update

Hi there,

This is the single biggest upgrade to BMABA CPD we have ever made.

Every course in our catalogue has been completely rewritten, from the ground up. Nothing is as it was. Everything is fully up to date as of June 2026, and much of it now incorporates the latest laws, legislation, frameworks and sector best practice. If you trained with us before, you'll find the same trusted qualifications reimagined as something far sharper, more current, and more genuinely useful in your dojo or club.

You can explore all of it now at mybmaba.org.uk/cpd.

New names, clearer pathways

A few of your favourite qualifications have evolved, with clearer structure and proper progression built in:

Our SENCO award has become SEND in Martial Arts, now split into a Level 1 Practitioner course and a Level 2 Coordinator course, so you can take it as far as your role requires.

Trauma-Informed Coaching has been separated into Level 1 (Foundations) and Level 2 (Practice), letting you build from core understanding through to applied, day-to-day coaching practice.

Our coaching pathway now has a clear three-tier structure: Foundation Coach (Level 1), Qualified Coach (Level 2), and a brand new Senior Coach (Level 3) for experienced coaches ready to go further.

Brand new courses

Generation 2 also brings a whole set of courses we've never offered before:

• Club Management Award, at both Level 1 and Level 2
• Event Ready, our event management CPD
• NROA, our refereeing and national officiating award
• CHIMA Second Edition, a fully revised concussion and head injury management award built on our concussion protocols, which have been approved by Professor Mike Loosemore MBE
• Coaching Neurodiversity, a new award dedicated to inclusive, neurodiversity-aware coaching
• Cadet Coaching Award, designed specifically for coaches under 18

And we're not finished. We have a further three courses already in development, and we'll release each one the moment it is ready, never before.

Built by experts, supported by world-class technology

Every Generation 2 course is delivered through a new, cutting-edge, BMABA-exclusive proprietary AI integration. We want to be completely clear about what that does and does not mean.

None of our courses are written by AI. Every word is produced in-house by our expert team, drawing on trusted sources and our external partners, and everything is checked by our own subject-matter experts, specialists and academics before release.

What the technology does is enhance how you learn. AI is woven in to power your interactive tutor (BMABA Ivy), to support live-feedback style essays and resources, and to make each lesson feel like a guided, interactive experience. Most courses now include a page-by-page knowledge transfer resource, so instead of facing a wall of text, you move through clear, digestible stages at your own pace.

Mapped to professional standards

Where appropriate, every course has been mapped to CIMSPA professional standards as part of its development. We are now beginning the process of submitting our CPD to CIMSPA one course at a time for formal endorsement, and we'll make it explicit on any course that achieves it.

In the meantime, please treat courses as CIMSPA-mapped rather than formally endorsed unless the course itself clearly states otherwise.

Nothing you've earned is lost

Generation 2 is an addition to our existing provision, not a reset.

Launching these new courses does not wipe your progress on courses you've already started, and it does not remove or change anything held in your verified records. Your existing qualifications, your National Records verification, your Regulation Ready status and your Club Colours all stay exactly as they are. Think of this as an opportunity to refresh older qualifications with the very latest material, alongside genuinely new CPD to explore.

Explore it now

Head to mybmaba.org.uk/cpd to see everything available to you, pick up where you left off, and start something new.

To high places by narrow roads.

Hi there,

Today we are releasing the biggest update to Club Manager since launch. Version 4.0.0 is shaped almost entirely by what clubs have asked us for: a faster way to get students onto the system, attendance that finally adds up the way it should, a proper home for your policies and waivers, and far less repetitive admin for the families you look after.

Here is everything that is new, what it does, and why it matters to your club.

Faster, simpler student onboarding

Email is now optional. You can create a student record with nothing more than a name and a date of birth. For the many juniors who do not have an email address, you no longer have to invent one or skip the record entirely. If there is no genuine email to enter, you simply leave it blank.

Add the next of kin in the same flow. When you create a student, the system now prompts you to add their next of kin straight away, with the option to skip if you would rather come back to it. No more creating the student and then hunting for a separate step.

Link to an existing parent. Where a parent or guardian is already on the system with another child, you can link the new student to that existing next of kin record without re-entering any of their details. For clubs with lots of siblings, this alone saves a great deal of typing.

Attendance that actually adds up

Set a default attendance status per class. Each class can now default to present, absent, or blank. Once the session time passes, attendance is marked automatically against that default, so regular classes no longer need marking by hand every single week.

Attendance follows the student. If a student trains in two classes that share the same belt group, their attendance now combines into a single total rather than being split across each lesson. And when you move a student from one class to another, their attended-day count moves with them, with a logged history of where they have trained. Progression now reflects the true, combined picture.

Set a starting count. Clubs coming across from paper registers or another system can now enter an opening attendance figure for a student in a class, rather than starting everyone back at zero. Your members keep the progress they have already earned.

A progression fix. We have corrected an issue where a student's progression page showed the same attendance figure against every belt. Each belt now shows its own correct attended-day count, and all of it feeds progression properly.

A proper home for your documents

A brand new documents area. You can now upload your policies, handbooks, codes of conduct and waivers as PDFs into a dedicated space within Club Manager. Look for the new label in your sidebar.

Shared securely with members and families. Documents are made available to your students and their next of kin through their own portal, and you control who sees what, with access passwords and controls available.

Acknowledgement tracking. Each document can carry a simple "I have read and understood this" acknowledgement, and you can see at a glance who has acknowledged it. For safeguarding and good governance, that record of who has read your policies is invaluable, and it is captured automatically.

Less admin, more control over your lists

Choose your own columns. Student lists and registers can now be tailored to show the columns that matter to your club, from a wide range of available fields.

Sort and export anything. Any list can be sorted by any visible column, and exported to CSV with your current search, filters and sort order preserved. What you see is what you get in the file.

A spreadsheet-style bulk editor. One of the standout additions: a bulk editor that lets you add and edit many students at once in a familiar grid, rather than one record at a time. For larger clubs in particular, this turns an afternoon's work into a few minutes.

Keep your place. When you finish viewing a student, membership or progression record, the system now returns you to where you were in the list, not back to the top.

Smarter next-of-kin access

One account, every child. A parent or guardian can now manage all of their children from a single next-of-kin account, including creating several students in one go, with the option to copy their own contact details across to save re-typing.

You decide what families can change. Clubs now have controls over what a next of kin can and cannot edit on a student's profile, so you can allow contact details to be updated while keeping medical information or belt records under club control.

Lockable forms and consents. Custom fields such as liability waivers and consent forms can now be locked. You can set a field so it can be completed only once, or so that any change a family makes requires club approval before it takes effect. Once something is agreed, it stays agreed unless you say otherwise.

Self-service memberships

Let members choose, if you want them to. Clubs can now mark a membership package as public, so students and families can select and subscribe to it themselves from their portal, following the same process as an admin-assigned membership. This stays entirely under your control through a simple toggle, so if you would rather assign every membership yourself, nothing changes.

Reliability and fixes

We have also closed off a number of issues carried over from earlier versions. Most notably, you can no longer accidentally trap yourself by deleting a belt group that still has classes or students attached to it: the system now protects those belt groups and tells you why, so a club can never be left unable to reassign progression.

Coming next: a payments overhaul

Alongside this release, we are already two weeks into building the next major piece of work, focused entirely on payments.

That includes a brand new Direct Debit integration through GoCardless, giving clubs a proper, low-cost way to collect recurring membership fees by Direct Debit, and a complete face-lift and simplification of our Stripe payments, making card payments and memberships cleaner, clearer and easier to manage day to day.

This work is well underway and we will be bringing it to you as soon as it is ready. We will share more as it takes shape.

As ever, thank you to every club that took the time to tell us what was slowing you down. Almost everything in this release came directly from that feedback, and it is exactly how we want to keep building.

Hi there,

Over the past few weeks, our Senior Leadership Team has been heads-down on three major external audits running back-to-back. We've come out the other side with results that genuinely set BMABA apart, and we wanted to share them with you.

ISO 9001:2015 surveillance audit passed clean

Our annual surveillance audit, conducted by British Assessment Bureau (a UKAS-accredited certification body) against the international standard for quality management systems, concluded with zero non-conformities and zero opportunities for improvement raised. That's an exceptional outcome by any measure, especially for a self-funded non-profit like BMABA CIC.

The auditor specifically commented on the level of detail across our QMS documentation, the maturity of the management system and team, and the depth of audit evidence we presented across every clause assessed. For a standard as rigorous as ISO 9001:2015, that's the kind of result that doesn't happen by accident.

ISO 27001 Stage 1 cleared, Stage 2 confirmed for July

We've also just completed our Stage 1 audit, again with British Assessment Bureau, toward ISO 27001:2022 certification, the international standard for information security management. Stage 1 was a substantial undertaking on its own, and the result has been strong enough that our Stage 2 (the full certification audit) is now scheduled for early July. Another hugely challenging audit process passed with no non-conformities.

If successful in July, BMABA will become the first independent martial arts governance organisation to achieve ISO 27001 certification. Not the first in our country. The first - ever. That's a position we don't take lightly, and we'll keep you posted as we move through Stage 2.

Cyber Essentials re-certified

Alongside the ISO work, we've successfully renewed our Cyber Essentials certification under the UK government scheme. This confirms that our development frameworks, system architecture, and day-to-day security practices continue to meet the national baseline for technical cyber security, across an expanded device fleet and updated cloud infrastructure.

Thank you for bearing with us

These processes consume an enormous amount of SLT time. Helen, Niki, Kirsty and Giovanni have been deep in audit preparation, evidence gathering, document control reviews and policy work for several weeks running. Response times on some non-urgent items have been slower than we'd like, and we appreciate the patience members have shown while we've been in this cycle. We also appreciate all of our team here - customer services, Bella and Cat in particular, who have been plugging the gaps.

Christina, for managing the Strategic desk in Helen's absences, and the whole SLT team for managing this alongside BMABA's considerable day to day.

Why this actually matters to you

This is the unsexy part of what we do. It's not often seen. It doesn't make for exciting social media. But it is the backbone of our credibility, and by association, your club's credibility.

When AXA underwrite our insurance scheme, when CIMSPA recognise us as a Training Provider Partner, when local authorities, schools, leisure trusts and corporate venues check who they're dealing with before letting your club through the door, these are the credentials that get you across the line. ISO 9001. Cyber Essentials. Soon, ISO 27001. UKAS-accredited, externally audited, independently verified.

It's what separates a properly governed, professionally run not-for-profit standards body from the dozens of self-appointed, one-man-band associations operating without any external scrutiny. Anyone can call themselves a governing body. Very few can demonstrate it under audit conditions, year after year, against international standards.

What's next

Stage 2 of ISO 27001 in early July is the major one on the horizon, and we'll share the outcome publicly the moment it's confirmed.

In the meantime, normal service resumes. We've got new CPD launching, some genuinely exciting partnerships in the pipeline, the next version of our CRM ready to roll out, and a long list of other developments that have been penned back while the SLT have been buried in audits and inspections. We can't wait to start getting it all into your hands.

Two places by narrow roads, as always.

Hi there,

You may have noticed over the last two to three weeks that the team here at BMABA, and our Senior Leadership Team in particular, have been a little harder to reach than usual. We wanted to take a moment to explain why, and to share something we're genuinely proud of in the process.

May is audit season at BMABA!

What that actually means

BMABA isn't a one-man band, and we're not making this up as we go along. As the professional standards body for the martial arts sector in the UK, we hold ourselves to exactly the kind of external scrutiny that you would expect from any serious governing body, and we think that matters.

Across any given year, our operations are formally audited and regulated by a number of qualified, reputable external organisations. These include UKAS-accredited certification bodies such as the British Assessment Bureau, who audit our Quality Management System against the international ISO 9001:2015 standard. They include CIMSPA, the chartered body for the sport and physical activity sector, with whom we hold Training Provider Partner status. They include the FCA-regulated framework that sits behind the insurance schemes we administer for our members. And they include the National Cyber Security Centre's Cyber Essentials programme, run by IASME on behalf of the UK Government.

Many of these audits, recertifications and surveillance reviews land in the same window each spring, which is why this time of year always involves a concentrated period of internal preparation and external assessment.

A quick milestone worth sharing

We're delighted to confirm that BMABA has just received its renewed certification under the Government's Cyber Essentials security programme. This is the recognised national standard for cyber security hygiene, and our continued certification means we've once again demonstrated that the technical controls protecting your data and our platforms meet the bar set by the NCSC.

It's not a flashy announcement, but it is an important one. The systems holding your membership records, your safeguarding documentation, your DBS data and your professional credentials are subject to real, independent scrutiny, and we think you deserve to know that.

This recertification also forms part of a broader development in our governance framework that we'll be sharing more about in due course. We don't want to give too much away yet, but it's a piece of work the SLT has been investing significant effort into, and we think members will be pleased with where it's heading.

Bear with us

As these audits continue over the coming weeks, you may find that responses from the team, particularly the SLT, take a little longer than you're used to. Email replies, governance queries, complex casework and strategic conversations may all run a touch slower until the audit window closes. Day-to-day member services, support tickets, certification processing and safeguarding matters will of course continue as normal.

We really appreciate your patience while we work through this.

It matters to us that when we ask our members to keep their qualifications current, their DBS checks valid, their first aid in date and their licences up to scratch, we're holding ourselves to the same standard. The audits we're going through right now are how we evidence that. We're being asked to check our own homework by people whose job it is to make sure governing bodies like ours are exactly what we say we are.

Thank you, as always, for being part of BMABA.