Making swimming safety affordable

If we’re serious about promoting learning to swim ... it’s time we took a proper look at how we can make swim safety affordable.

IN 2022, Australia recorded its worst year of deaths by drowning since 1996 with 339 people losing their lives in the nation’s waterways.

As a swim coach and former swim school owner, one of the great privileges of my life has been teaching this vital life skill to everyone from seniors to babies as young as six months. I’m passionate about swim safety and I believe it’s critical that everyone knows how to be safe in the water.

That’s why I’ve been really pleased to see the debate reignited about how we can better support families to access quality swim safety teaching.

I’m the first to admit that I don’t have all the answers, but it was great to see the legendary Dawn Fraser pushing the conversation forwards with her suggestion of subsidising swim lessons for children.

If we’re serious about promoting learning to swim and drowning prevention, it’s time we took a proper look at how we can make swim safety affordable for everyone.

But as with so many sticky issues, there’s no single, simple solution. The rising cost of living means parents are often struggling to find room in the family budget and sporting activities, including swimming lessons, can often be the first to go when things get tight.

Equally, those running swim schools are dealing with rising costs – chemicals, heating, insurance, staffing – it all adds up. I used to run a swim school myself, and they are expensive to operate. To have a real point of difference and ensure the best quality of teaching, you want the lowest possible ratio of students to staff. Not only can that come at a high cost, securing staff can be a challenge given the current shortage of qualified swim teachers. So many may be running their classes with more students than they would ideally like.

That’s certainly not a criticism of those who run swim schools – these people are running a small business and they have to make decisions about financial viability.

It’s another reason why it’s important to talk about potential incentives and subsidies to help families pay for swimming lessons.

Funding schools to provide swimming lessons for students is great, but from recent reporting it’s clear that accessibility issues still exist for some families. It also means some children aren’t learning swim safety until they are school-aged, when ideally we’d like to see kids learning this critical life skill as early as possible.

I’m also aware how tight the education curriculum is. We know teachers are already under the pump delivering what’s needed academically.

So I think we have a fantastic opportunity to bring the community and the country’s best minds together in some type of round table or think tank. I can speak to this issue from years of experience teaching swim safety and training Olympians, but I don’t have all the solutions – no individual does.

I’ve always said that if you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room. So let’s get all these clever people together to consider how we might be able to do this better, for parents and for kids. Their lives depend on it.