Trampoline parks arrived in the United Kingdom quickly and in volume. They are a genuinely different product from soft play, they attract a different age group, and they carry a different set of risks. Treating them as the same thing with more bounce is the mistake that leads parents to judge them by the wrong criteria.
Why the category is different
In soft play, the design intention is containment. The structure exists so that a child moving unpredictably cannot fall further than a short distance onto something soft. In a trampoline park the design intention is the opposite: the equipment is there to launch a person into the air deliberately, and the safety engineering is about managing what happens on the way down.
That changes the injury profile completely. The characteristic soft play injury is a bump or a graze. The characteristic trampoline park injury involves landing awkwardly, most often on an ankle, a knee or a wrist, and it is more likely to need seeing by somebody. That is not an argument against trampoline parks. It is an argument for going in with the right expectations and choosing well.
PAS 5000 and what it changed
The BSI publication covering this format is PAS 5000, a specification for the construction and operation of fixed indoor trampoline parks. It exists because the sector grew fast and needed a common reference for both the build and the running of a park.
The important word in that description is operation. Most of what keeps a trampoline park working is not the equipment, it is the rules and the people enforcing them. A well built park run without marshals is more dangerous than a modest one run properly.
Ask a venue whether it works to PAS 5000. A venue that does will say so plainly and will usually be pleased to be asked. That is not proof of anything by itself, and this publication has not inspected anywhere, but the answer and the manner of the answer both carry information.
The three rules that carry the weight
Almost all of the operating safety in a trampoline park sits in three rules, and if you understand them you can judge a park in a few minutes of watching.
One person per trampoline. Two people on the same bed transfer energy to each other. The lighter one gets launched by the heavier one's landing, which is the classic mechanism behind the serious injuries in this format. This is the rule that gets broken most and the one that matters most.
No somersaults unless the park allows them in a defined area. Rotation is the other route to a bad landing. Many parks ban it outright in the open court and permit it only into a foam pit or on to an airbag, with instruction.
Land on your feet, on the bed. Landing on the padding over the frame is a hard landing on a springy but shallow surface. Landing across two beds means landing on the frame between them.
A park whose marshals actively enforce those three, out loud, during a busy session, is doing the job. A park where the marshals stand at the corner looking at a phone has bought the equipment and skipped the operation.
| Soft play frame | Trampoline park | |
|---|---|---|
| Design intention | Contain a child so a fall is short and soft | Launch a person deliberately and manage the landing |
| Main hazard | Bumps, grazes, pinches, collision in a tunnel | Awkward landings, ankles and wrists, two people meeting in the air |
| Where the safety sits | Mostly in the equipment and its condition | Mostly in the operating rules and the people enforcing them |
| Reference document | BS EN 1176 series, including part 10 on fully enclosed equipment | PAS 5000, on the construction and operation of fixed indoor trampoline parks |
| Best age fit | Roughly 1 to 8, with the format peaking around 4 to 6 | Roughly 6 to 13 in a general session, younger only in a dedicated one |
| What to watch on arrival | Netting, slide exits, padding, floor staff | Marshals, one person per bed, pad coverage, pit queue control |
A working frame put together by this desk from published guidance and from the plain wording of the standards named on the page. It is not a survey, not a measurement and not drawn from any venue.
The briefing is not a formality
Most parks run a safety briefing before a session, either as a video in the lobby or a talk on the court. It is easy to treat it as a queueing ritual, particularly on a third visit.
It is worth actually watching with your child, once, properly. The reason is that the briefing is where the park tells you its specific rules, and those differ between venues. Where somersaults are allowed, how the foam pit must be entered, whether the walls are for bouncing off, what the rule is about the dodgeball court: these are venue decisions and they are not the same everywhere.
If a venue has no briefing at all and simply takes your money and points at the court, that is a meaningful gap, because the operating rules are the safety system in this format.
Age, weight and mixing
Trampolining is a poor format for very young children in a general session, and the reason is mass. On a shared court, a five year old is surrounded by teenagers whose landings shift the whole floor. Even with one person per trampoline enforced, adjacent beds are linked and the physics does not care about the rules.
This is why good parks run separate toddler sessions on smaller beds, with adults present and older children excluded. It is one of the clearest signals of a venue that has thought properly about who is in the room, which is a theme we return to in the piece on mixed age rooms.
Foam pits and airbags
The foam pit is the feature that looks safest and behaves least predictably. A pit of loose foam blocks does not absorb impact evenly: it depends on how deep the blocks are, how compacted they have become, and where the previous person landed.
Parks that run foam pits well restrict entry to feet first, control how many people are in the pit at once, and maintain the foam by turning and topping it up. Airbags are more consistent because they are a controlled volume of air rather than a pile of blocks, but they have their own rule: one person at a time, land on your back or your feet, no landing on someone else.
Either way, the useful thing to watch is not the pit, it is whether anybody is controlling the queue into it.
- Do you work to PAS 5000, and who carries out your equipment inspections?
- How many court marshals are on during a full session, and what is their brief?
- Do you run separate sessions for younger children, and are older children excluded from them?
- What is your rule on somersaults, and where are they allowed?
- How is the foam pit maintained, and how often is the foam turned or replaced?
If something happens
Ankle and wrist injuries are the common ones. If a child cannot bear weight, or if there is obvious deformity, that is an emergency department question rather than a wait and see one, and NHS guidance on broken bones sets out the signs plainly. Head impacts have their own guidance and their own warning signs.
Whatever happens, the venue should record it. What a venue must record, and what you are entitled to a copy of, is covered in the piece on incident records. Ask for the record to be made before you leave, while the detail is fresh, because you will not remember which court it was in a fortnight.
How to think about the format
Trampolining is excellent exercise, genuinely enjoyable for children who are past the age of needing containment, and one of the few indoor formats that stretches an eleven year old. The risk is real and it is manageable, and almost all of the management sits with the operator rather than the equipment.
Choose on marshals, briefing and session structure. If a park separates its ages, briefs properly and has staff who speak up, the rest usually follows.