Sixties school made sure pupils could swim

WHAT an indictment on a small island nation when a third of its children leaving school cannot swim. Why is being able to quote Pythagoras’s Theorem considered more important than the ability to get oneself out of a lake if one accidentally falls in? Here appears to be yet another area in education where we seem to have gone backwards in the last 50 years.

I taught in Wakefield throughout the 1960s at a secondary modern school that would probably have been referred to as “bog standard” had this expression been around at that time. Yet we prided ourselves in a near 100 per cent record when it came to the ability of our children to swim.

This was no doubt helped by Wakefield Council’s high priority to this vital life skill, the city, with its river, canal and sand quarries, having many dangerous water courses.

The council’s policy was that all children in their first year of secondary education went swimming every week throughout the school year. My school was a good mile away from the swimming baths and one of my many tasks was to “walk” a class of children to it every Wednesday morning. At that time Wakefield, a city less than 50,000 people, was able to boast two swimming baths, and one was devoted entirely to teaching children to swim.

Although at the time my school had three ASA teachers on its staff, we took no part in this swimming teaching process because the education authority had its own instructor. A blue, red and green ribbon system was used to encourage the children and show their proficiency, with the coveted gold ribbon being awarded for swimming a mile.

These ribbons were given out in school assembly and proud mothers sewed them on to costumes and trunks.

We were a “swimming” school and proud of it. Our children may not have been able to quote Pythagoras, but almost all would have been able to get themselves out, or at least keep themselves afloat, in the event of them falling into deep water.