to think theres an easier way to enroll for swimming lessons?

[booyhoo]

i queued for an hour this evening with a hungry two week old baby along with dozens of other parents to enrol ds1 for a week of swimming lessons during the summer. is this how all councils do it??? ive never done it before as ds was too young but i think its madness.

the ad said enrolling at 7pm so i turned up at quarter to and said at the desk "im here to enroll for swimming lessons". the lady took all my details and entered them on computer then told me to go and fill in an application form and join the queue. (there were already about 35/40 people queuing.) so i did. they didnt start taking the application forms til 7 on the dot and it took an hour before it was my turn to hand mine in and pay. now they are running 1 week classes with 3 different sessions a day for each age group throughout the summer and additional saturday classes, surely taking the details on the computer would have sufficed. i would have been in and out in 5 minutes

you are lucky
we used to have to start queueing at 6.30 in the mornign! on a sunday.

really???? this seems so strange to me. whats annoying me more is that she insisted on taking all my details and then getting me to fill in a form with the same!!! waste of time

ha ha ha ha ha

i am soooooooooo relieved its not just our swimming pool that does this type of thing - very very annoying and waste of time in my opinion.

Oh and when they change levels you have to do the same thing all over again.

If you are in/near London then Google "London Swim School" and you can do it for a term all on-line. Much easier than anything else I tried.

i'll try mum to lawyer's advice too.

one way round it (if you can afford it!) is private lessons! A friend of mine does it. It might cost a few quid, but your child will actually learn to swim, instead of messing about, getting cold and uncomfortable, waiting their turn, etc. and i suspect the quality might be better. if you were really organised you could maybe reduce the costs by getting another child involved if the swimming teacher agreed.

either way, what you went through, sounds like hell! i wouldagoneballistic! and doesn't sound promising for the swimming lessons ahead!

we book in through the phone here in North Lincs. However, one pool did have a 3 year waiting list ( I kid you not!!)

They have a ludicrous, overcomplicated system for booking swimming lessons at my local pool. You have to go and queue up at 9am on a Tuesday morning (and you get 4 chances a year to do this), and even then you won't necessarily get a place because there may be too many children continuing on from a previous set of lessons. We couldn't even go and queue up because it clashed with my 20 week scan and we decided that was more important. In any case, I'd have to have taken the morning off work to stand in a queue to do something that you should really be able to do over the phone/on the internet as far in advance as you want.