10 Sep 2026
Water Safety Is Now Statutory. What That Means For Your School
From 1 September 2026, the Department for Education’s statutory Relationships, Sex and Health Education guidance requires primary pupils to be taught how to recognise risk and keep safe around water, including the Water Safety Code.
This is a change we have wanted to see for a long time. Every summer brings the same headlines, and every one of them involves somebody who did not intend to be in the water. Teaching children to swim matters enormously, but so does teaching them to read a riverbank, a beach flag or a quarry edge before they ever get wet.
The requirement is now in place, and schools we work with across the Dover area have started asking what it means in practice and how much of it their swimming sessions already cover. This post answers both.
What The Guidance Actually Requires
The statutory RSHE guidance is separate from the National Curriculum PE requirements, which have not changed. Those still ask that by the end of Key Stage 2 pupils can:
- Swim competently, confidently and proficiently over a distance of at least 25 metres
- Use a range of strokes effectively, for example front crawl, backstroke and breaststroke
- Perform safe self-rescue in different water-based situations
What is new from September is the requirement under RSHE that pupils are taught how to recognise risk and keep safe around water, including the Water Safety Code. That is knowledge and judgement, taught as part of health education, sitting alongside the practical swimming above rather than replacing any of it.
The Four Elements Of The Water Safety Code
Our sessions include water safety education covering the four elements of the Water Safety Code as published by RLSS UK.
- Stop and Think. Take time to assess your surroundings, look for the dangers, and follow local signs and advice.
- Stay Together. When around water, always go with friends or family, and swim at a lifeguarded venue.
- Call 999. If someone is in trouble, call for help. At the coast, ask for the Coastguard. Never enter the water to attempt a rescue.
- Float. If you fall in or become tired, stay calm and float on your back, and call for help.
The order matters as much as the content. Children reach for the rescue instinct first, and the single most valuable message we can give a class is that going in after a friend is the thing that turns one casualty into two.
How We Cover It In A School Session
Water safety is not a bolt on week at the end of a block for us. It runs through the sessions, taught at a level that suits the group in front of us.
- Floating on the back and staying calm, practised in the water rather than described on a poolside
- Reaching and throwing rescues, and why entering the water is not one of the options
- Swimming without goggles and in clothing, so an accidental entry is not the first time it has happened
- Treading water and signalling for help
- Talking through where the code applies locally, from the harbour and the beaches to rivers and flooded pits inland
Practical skills and safety knowledge reinforce each other. A child who has floated on their back in a lesson understands the Float message in a way that no worksheet will achieve, and a child who knows why they must not go in after a friend is far more likely to make the call instead.
Where Our Responsibility Ends
We want to be straight with schools about this, because we would rather you knew now than discovered it during an inspection conversation.
Important: Our sessions support your school in meeting the water safety element of the requirement. Responsibility for delivering your wider RSHE curriculum remains with the school.
RSHE is a broad subject and water safety is one strand within health education. What we can do is deliver that strand properly in the pool, and tell you what we have covered so it can be recorded against your planning. What we cannot do is deliver the rest of RSHE for you, and any provider suggesting otherwise is overselling.
If it is useful, ask us for a summary of the water safety content covered with your groups at the end of a block and we will put it in writing.
Knowledge Is Not A Substitute For Swimming
There is a risk in this change that we should name. Water safety education is cheaper and easier to timetable than pool time. It would be very easy for a school under pressure to feel that the classroom element covers the ground.
It does not. As we set out when the school by school swimming data was published in August, roughly one child in four still leaves primary school unable to swim 25 metres, and the gap is widest in the schools with the highest proportion of pupils on free school meals. Knowing that a river is dangerous is not the same as being able to get yourself to the side of it.
The new requirement is at its strongest when it sits on top of real swimming, not in place of it.
Talking To Parents About It
Parents will hear about this change and some will ask what the school is doing. Two things are worth passing on to them.
- Water safety is now taught as part of the curriculum, and it is taught in their child’s swimming sessions too
- School swimming is an introduction rather than a full learn to swim programme, and children who swim weekly outside school get considerably more from their school block
We are happy for schools to share this post with families, or to send you a short paragraph for a newsletter if that is easier.
Booking School Swimming With Us
We deliver school swimming sessions across the Dover area, with our own teachers and our own lifeguard cover, and water safety education built into every block.
If you are reviewing your provision for this academic year, or you want to talk through how the RSHE requirement fits with the sessions you already have booked, get in touch and we will go through it with you.
Not a school? If you are a parent wondering how much water safety your child is actually getting, the answer for our weekly swimmers is: some of it, every single week. Have a look at our Water Safety Awards and our Learn to Swim Pathway.
