Scottish Swimming

Celebrating Learn to Swim month this September, the Learn to Swim National Framework is delighted to announce it has supported 220,760 children and adults across Scotland to be safer in, on or around water over the last eight years.

A partnership between Scottish Swimming and Scottish Water, the programme is delivered by 38 leisure trusts and aquatic providers in over 165 pools across Scotland.

It currently delivers lessons to 88,676 children and adults every week, a 6% increase from last year's total.

This includes 1,814 children and adults in the East Dunbartonshire programme.

Fellow Ambassador Tony Shaw, who won bronze at the Commonwealth Games, said, As someone who came through the Learn to Swim programme many years ago, I know the value of swimming as a life skill that keeps children and adults safer in water.

I have achieved success at the Paralympics and Commonwealth Games, but I am particularly proud of the inclusion campaign See My Ability, which has encouraged more children with disabilities into swimming.

John Lunn, Scottish Swimming Chief Executive, is delighted by the programme's track record.

He said, It's fantastic to see this national programme, rooted in water safety, thriving and growing, which is testament to the commitment of our delivery partners and swimming teachers across Scotland.

And there was probably two, two specific kind of projects that they did that stood out to the panel.

I'm sure Karen will go into them in, in a lot more detail, but one of them was including, um, or trying to embed the Scottish swimming teaching qualification in the, the secondary school column choice.

So, um, they'd worked really closely with Active Schools and Education to provide that opportunity as a kind of subject choice for senior pupils in the high school, and they supported and funded those senior pupils to go through, through SSTQ qualification.

Uh, and then ultimately-

And we're also running our lesson, swimming lesson customers.

The children in the lessons will have the opportunity to write their letter.

Obviously, the campaign that Scottish Swimming are running for, Duncan and Toni, for children to write their letters to, um, our ambassadors, so we've that on the go as well.

And then we've just sent out our newsletter to our customers, and in that we've got two small competitions running, and it's just dot to dots and crosswords, but it's all swimming related.

And then there's other work that needed to be addressed as well.

Normal Scottish Swimming work and work that I would do anyway, uh, that didn't, had, well, it had to be paused for a wee while but then-

Yeah

... had to be picked back up again.

Uh, um, because he wasn't good enough to make it.

Yeah.

And he never was on a Scottish swimming squad, uh, you know, a youth academy or a, um, a junior team or anything like that.

Not even close.