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

Swim lessons through school are usually not progressive and dare I say just ticking a box for some schools. If you want your child to learn this life skill you will have to get private/group lessons and get her to the pool to practise in between lessons. One school swim class my 10yr old was on had the kids in the water for 20mins out of the hr!

If you’re taking her in the pool, couldn’t you just teach her yourself?

@Villanousvillans does your local swimming club do lessons for non-swimmers? Ours has try-outs (minimum age is 8), and you need to be able to swim a length in 4 strokes at a semi-competitive time….
Lessons for beginners are local leisure centre, and private providers.

The other thing that really helped OP was finding a friend who was a better swimmer than my daughter and doing a few joint swimming trips with that family. The peer pressure to try to properly swim with the friend helped lots more than the lessons.

I’m a qualified swimming teacher. I used to go and help with school swimming lessons. The lessons weren’t great, apart from the group I used to take, obvs.

The best lessons are with a swimming club. I taught with our local club and the children had lessons in small groups of four or five. A teacher would go in the water with the beginners. The children made very good progress.

Seriously, butterfly? That's ridiculous. A strong front crawl , and back stroke for speed and distance. with side crawl for lifesaving ..that's what you need. Butterfly..for what? A useless for anything stroke .

School swimming lessons are designed to give children who otherwise would never get taken to a pool a chance to learn the basics. Children are meant to be able to swim 25m befire they leave year 6, according to the national curriculum. In reality, it's not possible to teach 30 non swimmers with such limited time in the pool and so many children. You need to pay for more lessons or take her every week for a while yourself. My eldest child is now a competitive swimmer but had over 4 years of lessons before he could swim a length well. My youngest child started swimming a little later but took less than 2 years to swim a length. Same teachers, just different children. If id left it to school, neither of them would be able to swim.

Hi, my daughter works for Puddle ducks/ Swim Academy swim school. She started as a poolside assistant and has now been a qualified swimming teacher for nearly two years. I would very much recommend giving them a try for your daughter's lessons, they have small class sizes and a brilliant teaching method.

All three of my kids seemed to take forever to learn to swim when having lessons. They went week after week, never seemed to make much progress - as you said, the teachers mostly seemed to be about technique rather than stamina or distance. But then, all of a sudden, it all seemed to come together, and they could swim really well, in all strokes (except butterfly - they'd been taught it but never really go to grips with it).

The best thing for them though was spending hours in the swimming pool on holiday. All day every day for several days. They learned more about swimming then than they ever did at swimming lessons, in my opinion.

Change to a different leisure centre maybe? My DD was bottom group forever, swapped centres and shes flown through the stages. Think they just keep them down sometimes to bleed more money out of you.

This simply isn’t true. School swimming is mostly completed by independent leisure centres with their own swim teachers, so they wouldn’t have a clue who the trouble makers are. The only time this wouldn’t happen is if the school have their own pool and qualified swim teacher on site which isn’t going to be very frequent.
I do the assessing for our schools, because I’ve got lots of experience and you need that to be able to accurately get the children in to the right groups as quick as I can so we don’t waste teaching time. I ask Tim to swim across the pool front crawl that’s it. And then I look at his frontcrawl. I have absolutely no idea if Tim is a trouble maker.

You need to take her yourself and teach her yourself. Also, 121 private lessons. You don’t need to learn 4 strokes, you need to swim lengths. Also, dive in, and pick up weights from the bottom of the pool and diving in and turning at the end of the lengths. Speed swimming. My parents also paid for life saving lessons, so I learnt swimming in pyjamas and dragging another person lengths of the pool in pyjamas. This is life lesson compulsories.

school swimming is 30 minutes of the teacher explaining health & safety and getting in the pool before it ends. That’s it. It’s the class larking about and behaviour issues of large groups, nothing gets done.

My kids swim independently from the age of 2 but they had private lessons in small groups since they were babies and we took them swimming on most rainy weekends instead of soft plays

Honestly most kids get private lessons as well as the school ones in order to learn to swim properly. I'd get cracking on this before she gets any older and more self conscious .

She needs private lessons, or private practice. School lessons are ridiculous, particularly in the bottom group, where not only do they put the non swimmers, but also the trouble makers. It is very difficult for anyone to make progress in this situation, and there will be a lot of time simply spent making sure nobody drowns!

The classes do sound bad but that one class isn't going to help her if she only started getting lessons at age 7 and if you rarely take her to practice. They have to have their head in the water or their body will be at the wrong angle and they will sink. They should be teaching her how to manage breathing though.

Where I live the kids start lessons as babies and definitely if they start at age 4 they have a lot of catching up to do. Age seven is very old. It would be like waiting for someone to be that age before teaching them to read. You wouldn't do that.

We can continue to lounge poolside looking glamorous and sipping cocktails while all the swimmers thrash about ruining their hair ☺️

I personally think that if you want yiur kids ti learn to swim so they won't drown, take them swimming weekly yourself. If you want them to learn to swim competitively then a swimming school is the right option. If we sre taking about swimming lessons during PE, that's just a tick in a box exercise that the students have been in water and has nothing to do with learning to swim.

If the school swimming lessons are anything like my oldest school swimming lessons, they are a waste of time. She's a competitive swimmer and was really looking forward to being able to swim in school time. Instead it was a 2 mile walk to the swimming pool. 60 kids in a normal 25m pool. The top group spent most the time queuing to swim a length, climb out and join the back of the queue again. Then a 2 mile walk back to school.

Op - Swim England do Water Safety Awards. If you're going for 1 to 1 lessons for your Dd I'd ask them to focus on them and distance awards. That sounds like it would be more of use to your Dd. Around me some of the swim schools use STA. My DD's followed STA for their baby and toddler lessons. The lessons at this stage were certainly focused on water safety (I am not sure if they are higher up as they moved to Swim England based lessons). It might be worth looking into if you have any swim schools that follow this system in your area.

Swim teacher here.

I agree with you that the swim England pathway is purely about making money. 10m butterfly at the same time as 10m backstroke (stage 5) is insanity. No swim teacher will agree that that’s the best way to get kids swimming, so it can only be about making money.

so I’ve set up my own swim school. For distance and deep end. I run special classes where I don’t care if you have a screw kick on breaststroke and can’t get your fly arms over, I’m not going to limit you to 10m to correct those techniques, when you can get on with 400m backstroke.

that said, you spoke op that your dd isn’t breathing correctly in the water, which ties in completely with only 6m. That is fundamental. There is no value on working on her stamina (you can’t anyway if she isn’t breathing correctly) when she isn’t breathing right. The teacher is right to have her in the lowest group, that’s basics number 1.

also, you and others on this thread, are keen to direct blame somewhere - the teachers, the pool, Swim England pathway etc - when actually, none of you are saying ‘my dc is really really poor at learning to swim.’ But that is the crux of it. If others are moving quickly through the groups, then it isn’t the teaching, nor the space, it’s your child.

and to conform to quite a few posters upthread who have confidently claimed ‘you can’t teach a child to swim in 12 school lessons’. I can. If the child is able to take instructions without fear. I’ve done it plenty of times, get very excited about taking a non swimmer in September and getting them kick a length on their back by December. It’s my favourite bit of my job!

And one final thing op - why would you complain about your dd being in the lowest group when she was stage 3, when you had absolutely no idea of the other children’s standard? It is entirely possible that stage 3 at 9 years old would be the weakest swimmer in the class. General rule where I live (an affluent area), but stage 1/2 - 5yo, stage 3 -6yo, stage 4 -7yo, stage 5 - anything from a 6yo up to 10yo. Club swimmers start sometimes from 7yo. So they’re doing 2km in an hour.

School swimming lessons are no way near enough to get a child to a decent standard of swimming. You should never have stopped the proper lessons. My child is 10 and it’s only in this last year they really work on stamina and distance. But she has been having weekly lessons at the leisure centre for 5 years. She’s on stage 7 now.

Haven't RTWT, but can she float with confidence? If not, it's not surprising that she will panic and put her feet down. I taught my own DC to swim, and then secondary students at school, and never advanced them further until they were absolutely confident about floating, then kicking. After all, confidence in floating/treading water can save their life, even if they can only swim a width.

Take her yourself is my advice. My son found lessons within a group so overwhelming and so I stopped taking him. Taught him myself without him actually knowing that’s what I was doing (he has Sen). It worked really well and he’s now a fairly strong swimmer and quite confident in the pool.

I must add school swimming should be a setting block, we always advise to do top up sessions or go with their parents if they dont attend the pool all that progression is often lost. The responsibility is also on the parent not the school.

As an experienced school swimming teacher I can assure you ive had non swimmers swim 5 and 10 metres even 15 metres so please dont write kids off there many factors at play. Op she closely gone back over and doesn't have understand of the basics such as aquatic breathing, body position correct arms and legs.