Refreshing insight to youth education

Yesterday a team from Water Safety Europe joined members of the Carmarthenshire Water Safety Partnership,  Mid and West Wales Fire and Rescue, RLSS and RedKite SAR in a demonstration of a new and refreshing approach to teaching young people the skills needed to stay safe in the water....By their school teachers.

Water Safety Europe trainers attended the demonstration that took part in the Carmarthen Leisure Centre facility and were surprise to see the new project was being taught to students by their school teachers.  The project has been based around the RLSS rookie lifeguard program and was incorporated within the students mandatory swimming lessons.  Groups were split into manageable sizes and were taught by their school teachers - who were supported by the centres lifeguards and staff.

But the most refreshing part of this is in the method of delivery.  As it currently stands teaching children to swim is part of the national curriculum, but educating them in water safety isn't and has been left to local charities and youth clubs to fill the gap.  Needless to say this leaves a huge percentage of our youth never partaking in any form of water safety education resulting in high water related incident statistics.

This new approach to lifesaving education helps bridge the traditional barriers placed on such training and enables schools to educate their pupils in these vital core messages.  But how does it work?  Quite simply actually.  The swim lessons are split into blocks (let's say for argument sake a class will receive 20 lessons a year)  the centre will deliver the usual curriculum based swim lessons and every so often will deliver the lifesaving training (say every 1 in 5 weeks) meaning the children are getting the best of both worlds.