How swimming lessons made a splash in Wakefield and why I was proud to teach children to swim – Yorkshire Post Letters

I WAS saddened to read (The Yorkshire Post, March 9) that, because there is a shortage of swimming teachers, over 90 per cent of those children leaving primary school could not reach Swim England’s targets.

Swimming lessons and coaches; why they matter as 500,000 youngsters a year risk missing out on learning how to swim – The Yorkshire Post says

A similar disturbing report appeared in your newspaper in August of last year. Both reports blamed Covid for the deterioration, but it’s doubtful that ‘all in the garden was rosy’ before the virus hit us. On reading both reports, I couldn’t help but reminisce. My mind went back to the early 1960s and my first teaching post. The school was a typical inner city secondary modern in Wakefield.

I’d already gained my ASA Teachers Certificate whilst at Training College, but on taking up my teaching role I discovered that I wasn’t the only one with such a certificate – the gardening teacher also had one, and when a new boys PE teacher joined the staff, he too had one. So out of a staff of about 20, three had a teaching qualification in swimming.

Not surprising, the three of us used this expertise when ever we could. In Wakefield, all children in their first year of secondary education attended the local baths once a week to either learn to swim or to improve their competence.

I was involved in this worthwhile and forward-looking initiative. The school ran an after school swimming club every week at the same local baths, where we tended to concentrate on improving performance. One of the female teachers came along to ensure that it wasn’t just a ‘boys only’ club.

The highlight of the end of the summer term was the inter-house swimming gala which the school’s 400 students attended, the baths being just a 20-minute walk away. We three were left to organise it and we ran it just like the Olympic Games. All four strokes were covered, including the relatively new ‘butterfly’. The first and second years raced together, as did the third and fourth years.

Times were taken and records broken. The ‘Grande Finale’ was the staff versus students relay race. The four fastest swimmers represented the school, the three of us recruited the Maths teacher to make up our four.

On the four occasions I took part the staff team won by the odd finger nail, indicating that we were quite competent ourselves. During this event the spectators cheered and stamped their feet, almost bringing down the rickety wooden balcony, the baths having been built before the turn of the century.

Such happy memories.

From: Doug Clark, Skipton.

IT is no surprise that career guidance has been hit by a funding shortage (The Yorkshire Post, March 10). Twelve years ago the Tories inherited a workable and improving system for giving careers advice to young people, which included the national Connexions service.

They had the funding and the expertise to give high quality advice and they concentrated a lot of their efforts in areas of deprivation.

To save money, the Government scrapped Connexions and made schools responsible for delivering careers advice, but with no funding and no expertise to do so.

They also abolished LEAs which were another source of advice and guidance, and forced many schools to academise, again as a cost-saving measure.

Your report says that young people in the poorest areas are less likely to have a specialist careers adviser, which unfortunately is also no surprise. Their levelling up rhetoric rings hollow and it is time they faced up to the consequences of their actions.

From: Roger Backhouse, Orchard Road, Upper Poppleton, York.

TOM Richmond’s excellent piece on the knighthood awarded to Gavin Williamson summed up the arrogant stupidity of the decision and the shameful refusal of any department to accept responsibility (The Yorkshire Post, March 10).

Gavin Williamson has always seemed a case of a Minister who was so useless even other Ministers noticed.

Maybe some good will come of this discreditable decision. It’s now obvious that the honours system has become increasingly a reward for political support and donations.

It has little to do with genuine merit. Let’s see it put out of its misery – and soon.

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