Short of Referees? What the FA's New National Refereeing Curriculum Means for Your Club

An experienced referee in black kit mentors a young trainee referee in a yellow shirt beside the touchline of a floodlit grassroots pitch on a misty autumn evening

Every grassroots secretary knows the Friday-night text. "No ref allocated for tomorrow." Then it's a parent with a borrowed whistle, a game that falls apart by the hour mark, or a call-off nobody wanted.

On 9 October the FA launched a National Refereeing Curriculum. It won't fix your Saturday overnight, and most of the coverage has treated it as an internal FA matter. It's more useful than that. If your club has been meaning to "grow its own" referees, this is the season to do it, because the training a new referee gets after qualifying has just been rebuilt.

Here's what has changed, what hasn't, and a plan a committee can run this winter.

What the FA actually launched

The curriculum is a single, standardised education system for grassroots match officials in England, delivered through FA Learning and backed by County FA workshops. Until now the development a referee got after qualifying depended a lot on which county they lived in. The FA's stated aim is the same structure and the same standard of delivery everywhere.

It's built around the four phases of the referee pathway:

Foundation: newly qualified and early-career referees
Perform: referees settling into regular matches
Compete: referees chasing promotion through the levels
Excel: the top of the grassroots game

Each phase has online modules tailored to that level. The topics are the ones that decide whether a young referee comes back next season: Match Control, Handling Dissent, Foul Recognition, DOGSO (denying an obvious goal-scoring opportunity), Tactical Fouls, Emotional Control and Wellbeing. Face-to-face workshops sit on top so referees can practise the theory, and a webinar series called "Grassroots to Greatness" adds ongoing CPD with guest speakers.

Rollout runs through this season: Foundation and Perform come first, Compete follows in November, and Excel in December.

Marc Birkett, the FA's Senior Referee Manager for Grassroots Referee Development, put the reasoning simply: "a more structured and accessible development journey was needed." One detail matters for anyone wondering where the money comes from. The FA says referee and match officials' registration fees will be reinvested into the new curriculum. The fee your referees already pay now funds their training directly.

What hasn't changed: how someone becomes a referee

The curriculum is about what happens after someone qualifies. The way in is still the FA Referee Course, booked through your County FA. Based on the county pages we checked:

Minimum age is 14.
The course costs about £130. Birmingham FA and Surrey FA both list £130, though county prices can vary.
Surrey FA's version is five online modules (around 90 minutes in total), online safeguarding training, about 11 hours face-to-face (usually an evening plus a full day, in the classroom and on the pitch), then five matches refereed to qualify.
Safeguarding depends on age. 14–15-year-olds take the free Safeguarding For All course. Anyone 16 or over who wants to referee youth football needs the £30 Safeguarding Children course and a £10 FA criminal record check.
Some counties sweeten the deal. Surrey covers the first season's registration fee (normally £25) and includes a whistle, cards and a resource pack.

Courses fill up. Surrey's page notes earlier courses were fully booked, so register interest with your County FA now rather than in March.

Why this matters for your club

Referees are the one volunteer group a club can't run a fixture without and doesn't directly control. There's real momentum, though. The FA's latest discipline report put registered officials at a record of around 41,500 with retention at 82%, and offences against officials are falling. We went through those numbers in our guide to the FA's discipline report.

A record national number doesn't help when your league's allocations are thin on a wet November Saturday, and new referees still drift away in their first season. The usual reasons are dissent, isolation and not feeling ready. The new curriculum targets the first and third: dissent handling and emotional control are built in from Foundation level. The second one, isolation, is where your club comes in.

The club referee plan: six steps for this winter

1. Find your candidates. Your best recruits are already around the club. Think 14–16-year-olds who've stopped playing but still love the game, parents who know the laws better than the coach, and adult players coming to the end of their playing days. Ask in person, not in a group post.

2. Pay the course fee, and attach a simple condition. At £130 a head, funding three new referees costs £390. Lots of clubs pay up front in return for a set number of club fixtures in the first season. Keep it friendly and in writing, and never make a junior feel they owe the club.

3. Appoint a referee buddy. Pick one experienced adult (a current or retired official, or a level-headed coach) who checks in before and after a new referee's first few games. It costs nothing, and it's the biggest single thing a club can do about first-season dropout.

4. Make the first five games easy. Those qualifying matches should be well-run club fixtures: a welcoming home side, a coach who keeps the touchline in check, and no hostile derby in week one. Tell the opposition beforehand that a trainee is in charge.

5. Back the curriculum, don't compete with it. Once your new referees are on the Foundation phase, encourage them to finish the online modules and turn up to County FA workshops. Ask them what they learned in the Handling Dissent module and share it with your coaches. It's the same conversation from the referee's side.

6. Write it down and publish it. A short "refereeing at our club" section belongs in your club policy pack and on your website. Cover who the referee contact is, how the club supports young officials and what it expects of spectators. Parents and funders notice clubs that look after match officials, and a LeaguePages club site makes that page easy to keep current.

A word on young referees

A 14-year-old with a whistle is still a 14-year-old. Most first-season stories that go wrong involve an adult on the touchline. Apply the same safeguarding thinking to young referees as to young players: a named adult present, no one-to-one lifts arranged on the quiet, and abuse from spectators dealt with on the day, not shrugged off. If a coach or parent on your side abuses a young official, your club will be judged on how it responds.

Paying for it without raiding the kit budget

£390 for three referees, plus a buddy's petrol and a bacon roll, is a small line on paper. It still has to come from somewhere, and in many clubs it's the money nobody budgeted for. A small, steady income stream earmarked for "developing our own officials" is easier to defend at the AGM than another one-off bucket collection. Our Lottery Lifeline guide covers how clubs build that kind of regular income. Platforms like PlayFundWin run compliant online prize draws for clubs, and a single month's draw can often cover a referee course or two.

The bottom line

The FA has rebuilt the second half of a referee's journey: online modules, county workshops and a structure that runs from Foundation to Excel. The first half is still about clubs finding people, paying for the course and making those first five games survivable. Get that bit right this winter and your new referees qualify into the best-supported development pathway grassroots refereeing has had.

Start with one name. Then book the course.

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