18 Sep 2018

What does the Government require from School Swimming Lessons?


I have recently noticed some confusion between our group lessons and swimming lessons that are supplied by the local schools. The main difference is in the set criteria between both kinds of lessons, as well as the class sizes. I will outline a few more differences below.

SafelySwim grades it’s students using the Swim England criteria, using this to decide when they should be moved to another stage. School swimming requires their students to be able to swim 25metres, to be able to use a range of strokes, and perform a safe self-rescue. However all of these criteria do not have to be completed until they leave year six. Unless children have regular lessons each week for the full year it would be very difficult for children to achieve these criteria beforehand.

SafelySwim believe the Government requirement is achievable by the majority of students going through Key Stage 1 and 2, however we believe schools do not do swimming enough to achieve these goals. Ofsted’s report ‘Reaching the Key Stage 2 Standard in Swimming’ provides evidence that schools do not do enough swimming lessons to their students during their time at school, this can be seen as many of the children in Key Stage 2 do not achieve this government requirement.

In my own experience non-swimmers in school lessons gain confidence quicker when they had either previously had, or still took part in, additional swimming lessons outside of school time. Those who had to rely only on school lessons, whilst still showing great improvement, took longer to build this initial water confidence. Ofsted also speaks about this in their report. They refer to the term ‘top-up lessons’ suggesting that children should be doing additional lessons of swimming with a swim school like SafelySwim outside of school hours.

In most of the schools, many pupils started as novice swimmers with little confidence in the water; by the end of the swimming programmes and top-up lessons, around three quarters of pupils in the schools visited had made good progress and met the end of Key Stage 2 expectation.

This got me interested to see what the outcome of school swimming and group lesson swimming does to increase the likelihood of non-swimmers being graded as ‘confident’. I found my results also matched Ofsted’s report.

At the beginning of Year 4, 60% of pupils in one school were unable to swim the expected 25m. By the end of the year, as a result of good teaching, this had reduced to 12%. These pupils benefited from additional top-up lessons in Years 5 and 6, so that a 100% success rate was achieved.

Overall these reports show that by providing more swimming opportunities to a child, this can only improve their ability and water confidence. I personally want to make sure everyone that comes swimming with us becomes more confident, enjoys being in the water and knows how to keep themselves safe and out of danger.

If you would like to find out more about what we do at SafelySwim, have a watch of Evan’s most recient video blog on School Swimming Sessions.

view the Ofsted Reportview blog