Olympia swimming pool regulations - is this 'elf and safety gorn mad, or sensible precautions?

[TeaAndTunnocks]

This article in the Courier yesterday highlighted that children are forced to wear armbands if they are under 8yo, even if they are strong confident swimmers.

The rules are:

The main provisions of the admissions policy are that the supervising adult must be at least 16 years of age, must accompany the child into the water, must maintain close contact with the child and a constant watch over the child and must stay within comfortable personal standing depth.

All children aged seven years or under must be accompanied in the water by a supervising adult on a one-to-one basis.

Additional children may be admitted to a pool with a supervising adult (in line with maximum adult-to-child ratios), if either wearing swim aids or presenting a pool swimming standard award at reception.

Do these rules put you off taking children swimming? Or do you accept them as necessary to keep children safe?

We use a swim vest with floats. I hate armbands. Seems like a crazy rule to me

We are taking one four year old, one five year old, four six yr olds and an eight year old swimming,four adults , is the adult child ratio going to be aceptable on arrival at the pool. Thanks

So you'd have 6 kids under 7yo and one over 8yo and four adults?

The little ones would have to wear armbands, I think but as far as I can see you would be ok. I'd phone and check with Olympia first though, cause it would be horrible to get everyone there and then not be able to take them all in.

Thinkit
We had the swim vests too rather than armbands

I made a comment on FB thinking it was maybe a 121 adult/child ratio, but clearly not!
Definitely H&S gorn mad, my kids were confident and very able swimmers from the age of 5-6, and would have been mighty peed off if they'd been asked to wear arm bands!
Olympia used to have a policy of making sure the kids could swim a length in order to be allowed to not wear armbands, then they issued them with a pass so they could show they were competent on future visits-presumably this no longer happens?
I'll stick to my policy of not going there-it's minging!

Wonder if they will carry the policy over to the new Olympia when it opens.