To nurture the skills of resilience is key to providing young people with the ability to cope with stress, adversity, failure and challenges. Resilience is evident when young people have a greater ability to “bounce back” when faced with difficulties and achieve positive outcomes.
Resilience allows an individual to think about exercise outside of PE lessons, improving their health and well-being. By learning how to swim and be aware of safety in any type of water, it allows the individual to have the confidence to identify any problems that they/others may have, and how to deal with it.
Every child should have the opportunity to learn to swim and receive water safety education at primary school and where required at Key Stage 3. Equipping children and teenagers with the knowledge, skills and experience in swimming and water safety will contribute hugely to their long-term safety in, on and around the water.
School-aged children are not a high-risk group, however drowning risk increases as children reach
teenage years, peaking among 20-29 year olds. Encouraging safer attitudes and improving skills and behaviours ahead of time is an essential ongoing priority. In order to reduce drowning in all age groups, children should have access to swimming and water safety education by Key Stage 2, with skills and knowledge addressed in Key Stage 3.
Swimming is a national curriculum requirement and by the end of key stage 2 pupils are expected to be able to swim confidently and know how to be safe in and around water. The 3 national curriculum requirements for swimming and water safety are to:
- swim competently, confidently and proficiently over a distance of at least 25 metres
- perform a safe self-rescue in different water based situations
- use a range of strokes effectively
The sports premium can be used to fund the professional development and training that is available to schools to train staff to support high quality swimming and water safety lessons for their pupils.
The premium may also be used to provide additional top-up swimming lessons to pupils who have not been able to meet the 3 national curriculum requirements for swimming and water safety – after the delivery of core swimming and water safety lessons.
Schools are required to publish information on the percentage of their pupils in year 6 who met each of the 3 swimming and water safety national curriculum requirements.
Source – Swim England