I couldn’t agree more with your leader “Swimming goes under” (TES, August 1). What school swimming needs most of all are convenient pools. Your survey shows that a half-hour lesson can take up to three hours out of the day. In an already overcrowded timetable, it is little wonder that heads feel they cannot spare time for swimming.
Swimming is a uniquely beneficial form of exercise, a fact well recognised as it is a national curriculum requirement.
The blunt truth is that we need more pools as a nation. Far from shutting down pools we should be looking at radical solutions to keep them open and adding to their numbers. Modern pool technology and construction methods can show the way, and the pound;4,000 a year spent on sending pupils to the local pool could be spent on funding your own pool, which can also become a revenue earner through community use.
The pool industry, which I represent, is committed to achieve these goals.
We feel so strongly about the future of swimming in this country that the British Swimming Pool Federation is now developing a package suitable for all those primary schools without pools, which would provide a cost-effective, easily maintainable pool to modern hygiene standards for teaching classroom-sized groups.
We would like to see the Government initiate an urgent debate to address this single issue, as well as pledging funding to ensure our children continue to be swimmers.
Allen Brobyn Managing director British Swimming Pool Federation 1A Junction Road Andover, Hampshire
