Do your children have swimming lessons with school?? How much do you pay?

[johnbarrowmanlovesme]

I am astounded at how much they are expecting us to pay to go for swimming lessons I have helped in the past & know that they don't actually achieve much. How much do you pay?

From the National Curriculum Key Stage 2 P.E.

During the key stage, pupils should be taught the Knowledge, skills and understanding through five areas of activity:

dance activities
games activities
gymnastic activities
and two activity areas from:

swimming activities and water safety
athletic activities
outdoor and adventurous activities.

Swimming activities and water safety must be chosen as one of these areas of activity unless pupils have completed the full key stage 2 teaching requirements in relation to swimming activities and water safety during key stage 1.

So they HAVE to do swimming in Key Stage 2 unless they can already do the following by the end of Key Stage 1

pace themselves in floating and swimming challenges related to speed, distance and personal survival

swim unaided for a sustained period of time over a distance of at least 25m

use recognised arm and leg actions, lying on their front and back
use a range of recognised strokes and personal survival skills [for example, front crawl, back crawl, breaststroke, sculling, floating and surface diving].

yup. Always free. It's a life skill.

My dd is in year 5 and they send a letter home asking for money for swimming - last year I forgot to pay and had a sniffy letter saying I was one week behind and could I pay up asap.

I am in the uk and dd is at a state junior school - so why am I paying and being chased for the money if it is supposed to be free.

Who is actually funding the swimming then - the goverment?

Dd has a half hour lesson once a week for the whole of years 3 and 4.

They go on a bus to the leisure centre, and it's all free

Ours are free, including buses there and back. From memory they do 1 term in yr3, 1 term in yr4, all year in yr5 and 2 terms in yr6.

Even before they were free as part of National Curriculum, out school funded them in memory of 3 siblings (2 of whom had been pupils) who drowned in the local canal. The Headmistress pledged that all her pupils would learn to swim & introduced lessons.

£18 a term but so many parents don't pay that they have cut it back and dd1 (Yr4) will not be going this term but will next term and dd2 (yr3) isn't going at all.

DD is in Year 5 and goes swimming once a week. They catch the bus there and it doesn't cost me anything.

Year 4 and 6 also go swimming at no cost to the parents.

about £50 a term.

We pay £2.

Not sure what its for tbh as the actual lesson is free and the kids walk to the pool and back, hmmmmm

£2 a week which covers a % of the cost of pool hire, transport, lifeguard and swimming teacher - have the newsletter in front of me.

But can understand you baulking. So far I have paid a £38 'voluntary' contribution to cover fruit & 'extras', money on raffle tickets and asked for a shoe-box full of food for harvest festival & contributions to the school fate and he's only been there 2 weeks!!

sp:fete!

Dh sarcastically asks if that % cost we're covering for swimming is 110%.

£40 per term (10 lessons). This is for Year 2 so not KS2, also invoice says it's towards cost of coaches. (They swim every term from Year 2 until end of Year 6).

First lesson today, DD1 is a good swimmer & can dive & do racing turns etc but spent the lesson in the shallow end with the non-swimmers. Fortunately, I've kept her private lessons on as well.

DS (Yr3) has just started & had his first lesson on Wednesday, for this term only and we paid just over £30 for coach hire.

Don't know how much good they will be and as they are only for 1 term this year he is doing his normal lessons as well.

Luckily for DS both sets of lessons are in the same place so he knows his level - yellow hat - and was placed in the correct group immediately.

Unluckily for DS's best friend, who is a better swimmer, his lessons are at a different pool and is on a different scheme so he ended up in the class below DS and mucked about because to him the 'little pool' is for fun & the 'big pool' for swimming, then my friend (ds's friend mother) got the 'talk' from the teacher. So following our conversation, friend now has a better understanding of the levels so will have a chat with teacher and try to get her DS in the correct level, which will hopefully also stop the mucking about.

But it's a bloody minefield, hopefully DS will get something from it & improve to a level more comparable to his age, if not - at least his normal lessons are going on as usual

So not just us having to pay then. I wonder why some school cover the cost & others don't I think our county have spent all their budget this year on 25 different bloody recycling bins per household

Ours are £3.50 a week and in letter they said it was broken down into : £1.20 swimming lesson and £2.30 for the bus.

We are a v small school and there will be approx 20 children a week going swimming from 2 classes.

School have asked if PTA would be willing to pay a contribution towards bus to help reduce the costs.

Apparently bus costs £56.00 per week.

I feel its bloody expensive especially consider that i like many of the parents in the school pay out for swimmimg lessons already.

Every term from Reception - cost buried within fees, pool onsite

We pay £15 a term, one term a year from Year 4 onwards. That is walking to the local leisure centre.

Some schools charge & others don't because schools can decide what they do with the limited money they have - those schools where swimming is free or subsidised don't have as much money to spend on other things. Sometimes the PTA helps with the cost of swimming - the school I work at has a pool & we have a Swimming association run by parents - I think last year they asked for a voluntary contribution of £25 for the junior children who swam twice a week, less for the infants who only went once. They swim from about half term in the summer & usually a month in the autumn, depending on the weather. Nearly every parent paid, those who didn't were usually not the worst-off ones.

The £25 per child wouldn't come close to covering the costs, especially with current gas prices, so we also have a swimming club - each family who wants to join pays £25 & can swim after school & at weekends & in the holidays, but there has to be two adults in charge at each session, one of whom has to have done the shallow pool life-saving certificate, so if we don't get enough volunteers the pool doesn't open for some sessions. The junior school still ends up paying quite a lot to subsidise the pool - the infant school doesn't contribute at all, despite the fact that their children use the pool for one session every day.

Our state school has an outdoor pool but are struggeling to maintain it. Half the PTA funds are ploughed into it every year.

We pay £14 per term for two 20 minute lessons each week. I don't think that is too bad.

A few other parents not happy with this, as their DS have lessons outside of school too.

I have spoken to the school & they broke down the costing so I could see where the money was going. They said they were expecting complaints about it so were prepared! I asked what would happen if everyone refused to pay it & they didn't know

Spoke to DS Teacher & she said I can't refuse as they HAVE to do it.

Would we be forcing the school into financial ruin by refusing to pay therefore making them pay for the lessons?

In a rush so I haven't read this all the way through but it looks like it might cover some of the issues being discussed. www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/jul/01/schoolsports.primaryeducation

I had to pay £35 a term in Year 3.

We pay about £25 for a term and a half. Half an hour every week. Ours get it for year 3 and 5 at junior school.

I agree they seem pretty useless. They have 60 kids in the pool at once and the teachers are just horrid.

When dd2 went into the juniors she could swim 400m. Perfect front/ back crawl and fairly decent breast stroke. Although they claimed to teach kids in ability groups she did not recieve a single badge or certificate to show progress in the whole year of lessons.

I don't actually think swimming is compulsory. They just have to be able to swim 25m at the end of KS2.

Thinking about saying no to the lessons in year 5 and sending her in with some private tuition homework to complete for her 11+