Indoor Swim Safe sessions reach up to 120,000 youngsters at Everyone Active sites

Swim Safe has gone indoors this summer at more than 100 locations – ensuring up to 120,000 young people had the opportunity to practice life-saving self-rescue skills and learn about the water safety code in a fun, engaging way.

Swim England and the RNLI’s experiential water safety sessions, which have traditionally taken place at outdoor locations, hit 140 Everyone Active venues during the school summer term.

Swim Safe is aimed at seven to 14-year-olds with sessions delivered by qualified instructors.

Participants took part in four interactive water safety activities designed to teach participants how to apply the water safety code messages in a swimming specific context followed by an opportunity to practice safe self-rescue skills required to survive an unintentional entry to cold water.

Opening-up Swim Safe delivery to indoor facilities allowed more young people to receive a consistent water safety message and experience.

Crucially, this ensured that more and more young people had access to the potentially life-saving training before they broke up for the summer holidays.

Further support is being provided by Swim England with the introduction of new water safety activity packs and resources, which include new miniature beach flags which will enable participants to familiarise themselves with signage used on lifeguarded beaches.

Ashley Jones, Swim England’s water safety and drowning prevention manager, explained: “Swim Safe gives young people a vital practical experience of water safety that really could save their own life or that of a family member or friend.

“We’re delighted that Swim Safe sessions took place indoors in collaboration with Everyone Active.

Important water safety messages

“Everyone Active has been a supporter of Swim Safe for many years and has worked closely with us to develop the indoor sessions.

“With their help and feedback, we have been able to develop an online training module that will enable us to train thousands of swimming teachers, who in turn have the opportunity to influence many hundreds of thousands of young people.

“In Swim Safe, as part of the water safety code message we deliver, we teach the children about swimming in a safe place. One of those safe places is on a lifeguarded beach in between red and yellow flags.

“Many of the games that feature in the new water safety activity pack and in Swim Safe rely on bringing water safety to life on the side of a pool.

“Rather than a soggy piece of paper or laminated bit of card that the pool operators had to make themselves, we wanted to provide them with the tools to deliver these sessions as well as engaging water safety session as part of school swimming and learn to swim lessons all year round

“Each pack contains two red and two yellow flags, two black and white and a red and orange windsock which will help build up the children’s understanding of the safety messaging they will see on a beach.”

Ian Cotton, Everyone Active’s group aquatic and activity manager, added: “We were thrilled to support Swim Safe sessions once again and work with Swim England to develop the indoor sessions.

“This enabled us to continue to deliver the important water safety messages to a greater number of children attending school swimming lessons and learn to swim lessons across our centres.

“The online training module is also hugely beneficial to our teaching workforce and allowed them to receive this additional training to support the delivery of the Swim Safe sessions.”