Tipping Point: Compulsory swimming in schools would benefit whole country

Whilst trying to prevent bored children from killing each other last week, a couple of things struck me. One was when did the Easter school holidays turn into a marathon? The other was how hard would it be to insert something mundane rather than all-digitally holistic into the curriculum – like teaching primary school kids to swim.

Not in some standardised, targeted, bureaucratic hands-across-the-water exercise in red-tape production, but actual swimming, with kids winding up, say, being able to swim a length of a pool without ingesting half a gallon of chlorine.

Too simplistic? You’re probably right. Swimming is compulsory in UK schools, with just such an official bar – one length of the pool – and it’s a bar a depressingly large percentage still manage to gurgle their way under, no doubt becoming even more resentful of the compulsory element to it than they were in the first place.

But at least there’s official recognition that swimming is different. Even those who otherwise despise sport can recognise the value of being able to swim. It can, literally, save your life, maybe even someone else’s. It’s also a skill that lasts a lifetime, with all the attendant benefits that come from that. Most of all, it can be great fun.

Watching my own going ‘tonto’ in the pool last week, like sleek seals completely at home, it was impossible to put a value on their ease in the water, although depressingly possible to run an internal tot on how much yours truly missed out on over the years through an inability to swim.

Lucky enough once to be able to get about the world a bit, damn near all of it wound up eventually at sea-level, maybe the result of some primal water urge which still couldn’t overcome an even more primal fear of the stuff.

This mottled Mick managed to get baked in Byron Bay without once getting in the sea, a notable achievement considering the whole point of Australia is water. Cape Town's penguins had the Boulders water to themselves. And who goes to the Caribbean to walk around the sights?

Learning to swim as an adult is an ordeal and it eventually took countless boring, resentful and fruitless early-morning pool trips until anger won out. It takes getting to a stage where you get so sick of not doing it that you actually wind up doing it. Pretty to watch it can’t have been, but the sense of accomplishment at completing a first length of the pool was overwhelming.

However, it was never the natural process it would be if I had learned as a kid. Too much thought goes into it. Even now I can only swim with an assortment of nose-clips and goggles which, if they were put next to a racehorse’s name on a race card, would look like every kind of blinker, tongue-tie, cheek-piece, and noseband in existence.

Escape route

But there’s a pay-off. It has opened up an avenue of exercise to a carcass battered by years of jogging and its legacy of aching joints and an attention-seeking Achilles tendon. Theoretically at least there’s still an escape route from even more morbid obesity.

Since we’re constantly being pounded with dire warnings of how even more unhealthy we’re becoming, a painless, beneficial activity open to young and old, which has social as well as health plusses, and which provides a valuable skill, has plenty to recommend it, enough surely for an official commitment to encourage it at a young age. A cursory curriculum examination revealed an ‘aquatics programme’, which outlines details of teaching swimming strokes and gaining competence and confidence “in, under and on water” but is a masterpiece of vague civil service shinola in that it doesn’t say whether or not it wants kids to learn how to actually swim.

Invariably some will say it should be up to parents to teach their own kids instead of passing the buck to already overloaded schools. And there’s always the eternal facilities wail.

Bigger picture

But there’s a bigger picture here in terms of long-term benefits to a state from backing a healthy activity which is enjoyable enough for even non-sporty kids to embrace rather than resent – if they can swim.

It’s important for primary schools to get involved, reaching children when they’re young enough to teach easily, and before awful debilitating adolescent self-consciousness becomes an issue.

And it’s important for the State to be fundamentally involved because sustained commitment requires sustained financial backing, not a token few weeks here at parents’ expense in order to tick off the PE box.

Effectively that requires making swimming an exceptional case, on any number of levels. And that would result in protests from other sporting bodies looking after their own patches. There is also a world of pain in administering a system that would make a meaningful impression rather than turning into just another link in the bureaucratic chain.

But I would argue it is worth any amount of aggravation and investment. Learning to swim is an absolute good. It can’t hurt you. It doesn’t matter how old you are. Significantly, it is also something women and girls have a history of engaging in and persisting with long after they have up on other sports.

Make it compulsory if you like, introducing the intent such a move automatically entails. It would be a damn sight more relevant than some stuff that is already compulsory.

But ultimately it’s not about definitions: instead it’s aiming to make a tangible and positive long-term impact on people’s lives. Surely that can’t be beyond our collective wit.