Setting Up a Safe Minecraft Club for a Local Youth Group

A youth leader I know in the Midlands rang me last spring with a problem I hear more and more. Her group had lost most of its 11 to 14 year olds. They were not doing anything worrying, they were simply at home playing Minecraft with each other instead of turning up on a Thursday night. Her idea was to bring the game into the hall. Her worry was that she had no idea how to do it without creating a safeguarding headache.

That worry is the right one to have. A Minecraft club can be a brilliant way to bring young people back into a space with adults they trust, but it touches online accounts, chat, images of children's work, and sometimes their real names. Here is how she set hers up, and what I have learned from talking to three other groups who run something similar.

Decide what the club is for before you choose the setup

The technical choices follow from one question: is this a social night where the game is the excuse, or a structured activity where the game is the tool? Both are legitimate. The first suits a drop in youth club. The second suits a library, a scout group, or a school holiday scheme where parents expect something to come out of the session.

Her group chose a middle path. Each six week block has a shared build brief, and the first one was to rebuild their own village hall inside the game, then redesign it the way they wished it looked. That brief gave the quieter members something to talk about, gave volunteers a reason to wander round and ask questions, and produced something the group could show the hall committee at the end. It also kept sessions from drifting into a free for all where the loudest player sets the tone.

The setup that kept it simple

Minecraft comes in two main versions. Java Edition runs on Windows, Mac and Linux computers. Bedrock Edition runs on consoles, tablets, phones and Windows, and those devices can play together. A licence for either costs roughly £20 to £25 per account at the time of writing, and schools can use the separate Education Edition through their own licensing. Most youth groups end up on Bedrock because members can bring tablets and the group can borrow a few more.

Here is the order she followed.

1. Agreed the plan with the trustees and the safeguarding lead before telling any young people. This included a short written risk assessment covering online contact, screen time, and photographs.
2. Chose a private world. She used a paid Realm, Mojang's own hosting, which costs a few pounds a month and only lets in players the owner invites. A group with a confident volunteer could run its own server instead, using an allowlist so that only approved usernames can join.
3. Set up accounts with parents, not through children. Parents created or confirmed the accounts, and the consent form asked for the in game username only. No real names in game, and none on the allowlist record shared with volunteers.
4. Turned chat off or kept it in the room. Text chat stayed disabled in the Realm. All talking happened out loud in the hall, where volunteers could hear it.
5. Kept the world closed between sessions. The Realm was switched to closed outside club hours, so nobody could log in on a Tuesday night unsupervised.
6. Planned for at least two adults in the room, both with checks appropriate to the role, as the group's existing policy already required for any session.

Minecraft carries a PEGI 7 rating, so the content itself is rarely the concern. The risks sit around contact and accounts, which is why most of those steps are about who can get in and where conversations happen.

The advice to "just let them play" misses the point

A few people told her that the best thing would be to open the doors and let the young people play whatever they liked. The argument goes that teenagers already know the game better than adults and do not want a lesson. That is true, and it is not the point. If the session is identical to playing at home, there is no reason to come to the hall.

What changed attendance was the bits that home could not offer. A shared world where everyone's work sat side by side. Volunteers who walked round and asked "why did you put the kitchen there?". A ten minute show and tell at the end where two or three members walked everyone through their build on the projector. Fizzy drinks and a tuck shop. Within six weeks, Thursday attendance went from around 9 to 17, and she counted five returning members who had not been in for over a year.

The game was the reason they walked through the door. The adults asking about their builds were the reason they came back.

Things that went wrong, and what she changed

Not everything worked first time. In the second week, two members spent most of the session knocking down other people's builds, which in Minecraft is called griefing. The fix was simple: each member got a marked plot, and building on someone else's plot needed their say so, out loud. Breaking the rule meant sitting out the next 20 minutes on a board game. It happened once more, then stopped.

The other surprise was the time limit. Sessions originally ran for two hours of play, and by the end everyone was glazed. She cut play to 75 minutes, framed by 15 minutes of chat and snacks at the start and the show and tell at the end. Energy stayed higher and fewer parents complained about their children coming home wired.

Costs came to about £70 for the first term, mostly the Realm subscription and two second hand tablets. She later covered the next year through a small local grant, and our guide to applying for a small community grant walks through the kind of application that works for this. If your volunteers are new to running anything game based, the article on leading a gaming group has useful tips on handling disagreements.

If you are thinking about a club like this, the step to take this week is not buying anything. Book thirty minutes with your safeguarding lead and walk through the six steps above together. Write down which of them your current policies already cover and which need a new line or two. Only then ask the young people what they would want to build.