AIBU to question school swimming progress when DD still can’t swim a width?

My mum used to pay me 2p every time I jumped into the pool. It's amazing how well such incentives work!

What a ridiculous comment. And not one you'd dare to make to the OP's face.

I assume you do know that swimming teachers do training and CPD to teach kids (and adults) to swim?

I took my daughter swimming about every second week when she was very young but she was reluctant to swim alone without any aids. I was concerned thst she still couldn’t swim by the time she was 5 so when she became desperate for a hamster, I told her she would get one the day she swam a length on her own. The next day she wanted to go swimming and immediately swam a width and then two lengths. The only problem was that it was a Sunday and we had to drive for a couple of hours before we found a pet shop that was open and which had hamsters in stock 🤣🤣

@Bunnycat101

the criteria is ambiguous.

stage 2 criteria is 5m.

then it’s the own swim school that decides how good that 5m should be.

you can get a swimmer holding their breath, kicking for 5m.

you can move them up if you like, but you’ve still got the approx one years work to do somewhere of breathing, kick and rotation.

@arethereanyleftatall your post is interesting as it does sort of show what many have suspected for a long time that the stages are absolutely not comparable across different locations or teachers. From a parental perspective, I don’t really care what the actual stages are but want to understand what the goals are and whether my children are progressing and improving.

My youngest is now doing a learn to swim programme with a swimming club that doesn’t follow the asa stages at all and I prefer it. The teaching is much better and sounds more like your school 1 (lots of focus on breathing and technique early on). It’s really noticeable that even the little ones have beautiful front crawl.

as a swim teacher who teaches in 2 different swim schools who are on opposite ends of the interpretation, @Conflictavoidanti would say the blame for this lies entirely with parents demanding progression. And for them progression means moving through the stages as quickly as possible. Precisely what the op has done. Whereas if they left it to the teachers who know what they are doing to teach, actual progression would be made. The far superior swim school I teach in does not pass out of stage 2 until they are actually breathing front crawl properly, with rotation to the side; they can often kick easily 200m on their back by then, as that is needed to breathe fc properly. The other swim school I teach in, where the private owner basically does whatever a parent requests in order to keep their money with her, will pass out of stage 2 at a parents demand because their child can swim 5m. Utterly to the detriment of the child who may well end up in stage 7 still not rotating. The children who get taught breathing properly, and spend time isolating leg kick in stage 2, fly through 6/7/8 in weeks.

Sorry for the slight derail from the ops thread. But a number of people have questioned how she can be stage 3 and not be able to swim 5m. It's something I've found often on swimming threads that people assume the way their child's swim school interprets the stages is the same as others. At the swim school both my Dd's went to (youngest still does and oldest swims for a club) the children had to be able to swim 10m without aids and be starting to do over arms strokes before they'd even pass them for stage 1. The descriptions on the certificate have always been a bit ridiculous and nowhere near met with there ability. Youngest Dd is now stage 6 and doing 200m just as a warm up (50m of each stroke). The lack of consistency between swim schools make the stages a bit meaningless really.

So unreasonable. You are the person with primary responsibility for her education. You've delegated some to a school who have taught her the basics. School have other things to teach her, they can't do everything. Maybe take a bit of responsibility for the child you chose to bring into this world?

Take her for private lessons. I took my daughter every Sat morning from age 3. She went all the way through to stage 10 & then chose life guarding. She subsequently qualified as a pool life guard. Consistency is key. School swimming is pretty pointless!

I'm not sure if be much chop at teaching water safety either. I'd be able to teach an awkward, energy using doggy paddle, but having seen the way that the swimming teachers teach kids to float by adjusting them subtly in the water, and how they get them to be efficient when they swim so they don't flail away all their energy in the first few minutes is beyond me and my (school & council lessons taught) ability to swim.

I can bob about in a pool on holiday, but I don't get any pleasure from swimming and I'd never do it for exercise. My DS, who has been in lessons since 6 months old, adores swimming and finds it a great joy. That in itself is worth the cost of lessons for me, setting him up to have an activity he can enjoy through his life.

Or more accurately, to facilitate that learning.

However, water safety is the life skill, not swimming. So water safety is the thing to concentrate on.

Yes - swimming teachers do courses on how to teach - they don't just rock up and tell a child to swim down the pool.

You can definitely outsource swimming. I wouldn't have a clue how to teach someone to swim.

Why haven’t you had her in regular swimming lessons or taught her yourself (regularly) if you’ve noticed she can’t really swim? This is down to you as parents, not the school alone. School swimming lessons are notoriously rubbish. Sorry but this is a parenting failure on your part here. Stop relying on everyone else and help your child fffs.

I felt similar about my DDs. They had swimming lessons almost from birth … but age 6 & 7 they still couldn’t swim unaided by floats, wings, rings etc 🤷🏼‍♀️ I did take them frequently. They were completely confident in the water. It literally baffled me. We were on holiday in the Summer and I said whomever could swim a width of our pool unaided first was getting the latest, coveted Barbie doll. DD2 swam straight across the pool! DD1 watched her, obviously thought fuck that and immediately followed her 😂 I think perhaps it just needed to be more incentivised…bribery isn’t always a bad thing. I hated taking them to swimming lessons 😂

I do understand the frustration with lessons putting a focus on less useful strokes. My son did lessons for a few years but stalled for several terms in the third from the top category because he couldn't get the breaststroke kick properly. He was good at front and back crawl, but wasn't getting to progress at those entirely because he couldn't get a weird froggy kick exactly right. What he really needed was more time spent building up his breathing stamina in front crawl, but he wasn't getting it.

After the third time he failed to pass up, I didn't renew the lessons and got a gym membership instead so he could just go swimming regularly. Within a few weeks he was doing multiple lengths with tumble turns in between (which he learned from youtube). In the summer I might book a few one-to-ones at the gym to help him improve his technique, but more than anything he needed lung stamina. I don't know if he'll ever learn proper froggy kick, if he wants to eventually, he can work on it. But stalling his progress on the more useful swimming stroke, just felt so pointless.

Can other kids in the class swim a width? If they can, it’s your kids inability not the schools

Mine were swimming by 2. They had such confidence from their baby classes

This is just a way for swim centres to make money!. Nobody learns to swim as a baby.

So you do nothing with her, she goes once a week for a few months a year and what are you expecting? Do better.
schools have to take kids swimming as part of the national curriculum but it’s getting worse year on year as the entitlement of parents think schools can fix everything. When you’ve got a class of 33 and 20 non-swimmers, the miracles of progress that happen are astounding, yet they barely swim more than 10m after a course if they’ve worked hard.
‘I don’t like the instructor’ is your mentality rubbing off on her - excuses and more excuses.
Book swimming lessons if you can afford to and stop the excuses and get her swimming! Lessons are cheaper than paying for a family to swim weekly so find £5-7 a week - that’s all they cost!

It's completely pointless for children who are already strong swimmers.

this isn’t true. We teach at school swimming all sorts of survival stuff not taught anywhere else - HELP position, side stroke, beach flags, huddle position, survival stroke, go through all sorts of self rescue scenarios etc and also for many strong swimmers, who aren’t good at everything at school, it’s a lovely confidence booster to be top of the class.

Both my DS started by earning badges in splash classes. They both ended up swimming for their county. Swimming sessions should be regular, frequent and with properly qualified teachers. I, myself, was a competition referee. Be very cautious with the butterfly. At a young age it can cause severe damage to the joints and muscles if pushed too hard.

This is a good point

I replied to another comment earlier in the thread and IMO butterfly should be added at a higher stage than it is currently. Most people are never going to do fly if they're not in competitive swimming

I stopped my oldest child doing the school swimming when he joined a Swim Club because 1) he absolutely hated going and was getting extremely dostressed by the sessions and 2) he could clearly already swim to a good standard. They tried arguing that the cirriculum states they need to be able to swim 25m, I pointed out that he trained twice a week and had swam both 50m and 100m races at this point, so he had clearly far exceeded it anyway.

It's completely pointless for children who are already strong swimmers.

I taught my four all grown now myself, the younger the better, as they got older three went on to be really good swimmers one can swim but doesn’t enjoy it as much. It needs to be enjoyable like most things they learn.