Swimming

Swimming at Preston Park

At Preston Park our aim through school swimming is to build every child’s water confidence, ensuring that by the end of their lessons they can be safe around all bodies of water and look forward to swimming, actively seeking out opportunities to swim safely outside of school. We want pupils to understand that swimming supports their health and wellbeing as well as being a lifesaving skill.

Swimming at Preston Park has evolved over the years as we continue to reflect and refine our practice.  We have progressed from solely Year 4, to adding Year 5 and 6 swimming to our current offer.

Our aim through school swimming is to build the children’s water confidence, ensuring that by the end of their lessons they can be safe around all bodies of water and look forward to swimming, including having a good understanding of how swimming can positively impact their health and wellbeing.

For many of our children, school swimming is their first experience of being in a swimming pool. For some, they may have never even seen a pool before. For this reason, the main bulk of our effort has been to give the pupils a brilliant first experience of swimming. To do this we strive to remove barriers such as providing the correct clothing where necessary and by taking children to watch what happens at swimming before they go, seeing where to help reduce anxiety and increase the children’s enjoyment levels.

Our initial swimming offer had children going swimming for half of their Year 4 PE curriculum. After looking at our data and completing surveys with our pupils, we discovered that after finishing Year 4 swimming, most of the children then didn’t go on to continue swimming, meaning that all the confidence and ability they had built up was never built on again.

Due to the Sports premium, we are able to provide top up lessons for the children in Year 5 and Year 6 which helps enable the children who are not reaching the expected level and gives children a further opportunity to experience swimming. Since we introduced swimming in Year 5, we have noted that the children have more confidence when attending swimming for the second time and often stated they felt safer in the water this time around. As we have just introduced this, we cannot see a difference yet in the data but will hope to see an overall difference in our percentages at the end of Key Stage 2 (Year 6) as we hope to continue to offer the top up lessons.

Preston Park’s current swimming offer

Summer Term: Year 4 receive 14x 45-minute swimming lessons

Spring Term: Year 5 to receive 10x 1-hour swimming lessons

Summer term: Year 6 receive 10x 1-hour swimming lessons

With this new offer, the children are given further opportunities after Year 4 to enhance their swimming skills and increase their confidence in the water. We are hoping that by the end of Key Stage 2 are percentages of children who are able to swim confidentially for 25 metres increase.

Our final barrier is to encourage and enable more children and families to access swimming outside of school. This is the biggest barrier both financially and geographically. Parents will be informed of their child’s progress in swimming and encouraged to develop the skill outside of school in local pools. Any offers that local pools give to the school will be sent directly to parents.

Swimming is a high priority for Preston Park’s PE Team and the school as a whole. For this reason, we will continue to shift and pivot our offering until we land on a format that enables as many of our pupils as possible to reach their swimming potential, ensuring that safety and enjoyment remain our top focus! 

Before starting swimming in Year 3: taken from 110 children

Only 62% said they have been in a swimming pool before.

• 24.5% say they have taken part in swimming lessons outside of school before.
• 75.5% of the children are excited for their school swimming lessons.
• 33% of Year 3 children are feeling nervous about starting their swimming lessons.

After swimming in Year 5: taken from 103 children

• 96% of children said that they enjoyed school swimming.
• 78.5% said they would like to go swimming regularly with their family and friends after completing school swimming.
• 91% feel more confident in the water than they did before starting their school swimming lessons.
• Given the chance 92% would swim again in Year 6.