Two National Marks of Trust: Warrior Spirit Earns Club Colours and Regulation Ready Gold

We've got some news we're really proud to share. Warrior Spirit Martial Arts has been independently recognised by BMABA, the British Martial Arts & Boxing Association, with two of the highest standards a UK martial arts club can hold: Club Colours Certified and the Gold Regulation Ready Award.

If that sounds like a lot of official language, here's the short version. An independent body has gone through how we run our club, top to bottom, and confirmed we're doing things properly. For the families who train with us, that's what these awards are really about.

What is Regulation Ready Gold?

Regulation Ready is BMABA's governance framework for martial arts clubs. It looks at the things that should never be left to chance: compliance checks, clearly defined leadership and safeguarding roles, and proper oversight of club policies. Clubs are assessed and graded, with Bronze as the entry standard and Gold sitting right at the top.

Warrior Spirit has been awarded Gold, the highest tier available. It means our governance has been measured against nationally recognised expectations for safety, transparency, and how a club is actually run day to day, and it has come through at the top level. The framework operates under BMABA's ISO 9001:2015 UKAS-accredited quality management system, which is the same kind of independent standard you'd expect from any organisation that takes accountability seriously.

Note that the valid until date will expire, and we won't update this article every few months, so feel free to check our status live at https://bmaba.org.uk/verify at anytime.

What is Club Colours?

Club Colours is BMABA's safeguarding and governance accreditation, and it's the standard the whole framework builds towards. To earn it, a club has to be fully vetted: instructor qualifications, enhanced DBS checks, insurance, first aid, safeguarding policies, and proper club administration are all verified, and every person actively teaching has to be checked and confirmed on BMABA's national database.

It is not handed out lightly. Only a small number of clubs across the entire country currently hold and maintain Club Colours, and clubs that earn it are recognised as a BMABA "School of Excellence."

Here's the part that matters most for parents. Achieving Club Colours brings automatic recognition under the Safeguarding Code in Martial Arts (SCiMA), a scheme backed by Sport England. That means Warrior Spirit now appears on the national register that parents, schools, and local authorities can use to check that a club has reached and maintained genuine safeguarding standards. It's a public, verifiable mark of trust, and you can confirm it yourself at any time.

Why this matters to us

Martial arts is not a regulated industry. Anyone can hang a sign on a door and start teaching, and there's no legal requirement that they've been vetted, insurance checked, or safeguarding trained. That's exactly why we chose to put ourselves through this.

As the UK's first Trauma and Mental Health Informed Martial Arts club, with a membership that includes a high proportion of neurodivergent students, safeguarding and inclusion aren't an add-on for us. They're the foundation everything else is built on. These awards confirm, independently, that the standards we hold ourselves to behind the scenes are the real thing and not just words on a website.

Club Colours isn't about unnecessary bureaucracy. It's about doing the basics that every club should do, and then proving it through a framework that can stand up to scrutiny. We think every family deserves that level of confidence when they trust us with their training, and with their children.

See it for yourself

You can verify our status independently at any time through bmaba.org.uk/verify. If you have any questions about what these awards mean, or about how we keep our students safe, please just ask. We're always happy to talk about it.

Thank you to everyone who makes Warrior Spirit what it is. These recognitions belong to the whole club.