Kiwi kids’ swimming in decline

New Zealand children’s swimming ability is going backwards.

A new report just released to Campbell Live has shown that New Zealand children are worse swimmers now than they were in 2001.

Swimming in New Zealand is not just treading water, it’s going backwards.

The report says one in two kids cannot swim 25m and only a third can swim 50m.

Only one in five can swim 200m, the benchmark distance considered necessary to swim and survive in the water.

Perhaps most worryingly a quarter of children cannot get across 25m or tread water.

Water Safety NZ manager Matt Claridge says this will result in more deaths in an island nation which already has a per capita drowning rate twice that of Australia’s.

“We’re estimating that drownings are going to be up around in excess of 150 deaths per year from the year 2025. That’s really considerable given the fact that the primary school kids of today and the 1990s are not being exposed to Learn to Swim education.”

Claridge says the decline in children’s swimming ability is due to a number of factors including a lack of funding for schools.

“Schools don’t get enough funding support to adequately deliver Learn to Swim. Whether that’s maintaining a facility on their own premises or taking kids to a public pool. It’s generally too difficult,” he says.

I agree that this inability to swim is a concern but teaching children to swim has never been the responsibilitiy of schools by themselves.

Neither of my parents were confident swimmers but they ensured my brothers and I were. As soon as we were old enough we had lessons in the school holidays and we also went to swimming club. Then they took us to the river every free Sunday (which was mostof them) from Labour weekend to Easter where we put the lessons to use.

It’s more than 40 years since I learned to swim and even then if it had been left to the school I doubt if I’d have learnt enough to save myself.

The expense and work involved in the upkeep needed to meet modern standards mean many schools no longer have their own pools and there may be a problem of insufficient money in the overstretched education budget to allow schools to take chidlren to public pools.

With so much more in the curriculum now it’s even less realistic to leave swimming lessons to schools by themselves than it was four decades ago.

Not all families will be able to afford swimming lessons but we can’t expect schools to be responsbile for yet another area where society falls short without giving them more money and staff. Even then we might also have to let them take something else out of the curriculum if they’re to fit more swimming in.