Swimming lessons at school and out of school?

[Methodlem]

DC is in year 3 and is average in terms of swimming ability (as far as I can judge. Most children in their class appear to be about age 7).

If your child does swimming lessons at school do they also do them out of school? DC doesn't love them and they do take up a whole evening so we can't relax/ do homework etc.

I saw school lessons as a useful bonus on top of our regular lessons. DS1 was lucky to finish the full quota in Feb 2020, DS2 lost half of his quota to the year group between as they caught a huge brunt of Covid restrictions/ lockdowns in their usual window. With well-timed school swimming, DS1 became confident in deep water quicker than DS2 (DS2 is usually physically ahead by age). Having had lockdowns prior to commencing the school lessons, the starting level was lower in DS2's class, and the outcomes of those reaching 25m poorer, and standards of stronger swimmers with good stamina far weaker with half the time to progress.

Our school has a strong proportion of swimmers to non-swimmers and the small group of non-swimmers make good progress. There's only a couple who struggle with confidence from the beginning. Schools with different demographics have different ratios of swimmers and it is harder to teach cohorts where numbers of non-swimmers are higher and may have zero experience of swimming.

I've prioritised swimming because I left primary school as one of the two non-swimmers of my year group (60). I had a much better provision of swimming than most schools can provide these days, with school pools in infants and lessons from y2-y6. The ongoing weekly lesson is also good whole-body exercise and good for DS1's dyspraxia.

I agree with a pp that non-swimmers who know to swerve water and strong swimmers are "safer" than those with basic swimming skills who easily overestimate their abilities.

School lessons are only two terms in year 4 at our school so mine (years 4 and 3) have private lessons as well. I wouldn’t like to rely on school lessons, unless it’s a school with its own pool which does long term, regular lessons.

Our school only offered one term of lessons in Year 4. That isn't enough to turn a non-swimmer into a swimmer. Both of mine had swimming lessons outside school starting from age 4 and by the time Year 4 rolled around were both strong swimmers already. We did the lessons on weekends and yes, they did eat up half of a Saturday for yers, but it was so worth it.

Relaxing = good

Doing homework at 7 = bad.

For goodness sake don't give up swimming in favour of homework!

I think when ds was younger I read on here that it was a good thing for kids to get to at least stage 5 and preferably stage 7. But maybe intensive courses in the holidays would work better for you.