Schools: Swimming and Life-saving Skills

Lord Addington Excerpts

Wednesday 6th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, this is one of those debates in which you find yourself rapidly agreeing with everybody in front of you. The basic tenet of it—that swimming is a skill that will save your life and is best learned early—will have nobody disagreeing. The fact that it is a social skill that allows you to do other things is pretty obvious as well. I asked the Minister if he had a list of all those sports you cannot do. The noble Lord, Lord Dunlop, said there were 20. I did not get that far. I just knew that there was a big list of activities which are not available to you if you cannot swim.

There is a little bit of social isolation in there as well, and it is something that is dangerous. It is something which we are supposed to be doing. The noble Lord read out a list of figures I had seen as well. More than a quarter of schools are not doing anything. The Government set targets. How are we not actually implementing this? If we have got ourselves into a mess where a few people are saying, “We can’t get there, we can’t afford the bus fare to get to a pool because the local authority has shut it down because it didn’t have enough budget”, this may go beyond the Minister’s area of control, but this is a factor that plays into it. There is no way that you can ignore the capacity in local government with this figure because most schools, particularly junior schools, do not have their own pool.

We can also say, “What about independent schools? How are we accessing them? How are they helping?”, but ultimately it is still the transport to them. There is a big interaction here going on from the various bits of government and the approaches to it. The prioritisation of this is very important as well. Is this regarded as something that you will have to do, or something that you will fit in round the edges?

When most of these situations come up—usually less life-threatening ones—it is the same thing that is happening in education in other areas, such as the arts, sport, et cetera. An interaction here is of course more direct—“Here is your core, and here are the things we would like you to do”. Learning to swim cuts across this. It becomes a real priority, so the figure of 26% of primary schools is utterly unacceptable. It would be nice to hear from the Minister exactly what we are doing to address that.

I return to the idea of sports, and the idea the noble Lord, Lord Dunlop, mentioned, that swimming is one of those activities that are easier to do in later life. If you are in water that carries your weight, you are less likely to damage yourself in various ways. That applies if you are taking exercise, and it is useful for rehabilitation from sports injuries—even for horses—and it is a good way of taking gentle exercise. It is also an essential part of making sure that there is social interaction in many mainstream sports that are readily available; canoeing is one example. How can you get in there and become a part of it? We often talk about mental health problems, and once you are part of that sport, company, activity and focus help. If you take that away, you are cutting off whole bits of activity.

The anecdotage of the Bishops’ Bar comes out. Somebody said to me, “I knew somebody who was a good sportsman and went to live in Australia. He discovered that he couldn’t swim, so he spent large parts of his life watching the rest of his family on the beach as he hid from the sun under towels”. Possibly that is a more jokey part of it, but it is still something that says, “You can’t do it”.

How are we doing on water safety? The fact of the matter is that if you fall into certain types of water, it does not matter how good you are at swimming—you are in real trouble. Deep, cold and fast-running water are things we do not like being in. If you hit cold water, you go into a sort of system shock, where you try to take a breath, and if you are underwater, you are probably not getting out. So training about what to avoid and what not to go near is another important part of this.

How do we train people to make sure that you do not go in there—you do not swim in that small river with a current of, say, a couple of knots, because most people cannot swim against that, and they cannot do it for any length of time? That sort of education is also a key part of what is going on, making sure that you stay safe. It is also a good thing if you are taking it as a social activity, because you will know the limitations of your capacity as a swimmer. This is the sort of information that we need, and we need it early.

We live predominantly in cities, and virtually all of them have rivers running through them; that is probably why they were built there in the first place. We have access to open, cold, running water all the time. Mix that with alcohol—we have a habit of building bars beside these nice bits of water—and we end up with situations where people go in. Something else that comes in here is whether people know—it may cut through the fog of the cheap cocktail—that you should not go for a little paddle in there now, and whether your friends, who are hopefully not quite as far gone, know what to do to get you out and call for help. There is no downside to making sure that we get better figures for making sure that people can swim, and early on. I hope that when the Minister gives his answer, he will be able to do that.

I have one last specific question, which I sent through to the Minister’s office. There seems to be a suggestion in the briefing provided by the Library that those with special educational needs in schools are not getting access to this. Anybody who has suffered me in a series of debates on this subject will know that that is one of my key areas. However, I do not think that we are talking about dyslexics en masse but about specific groups. Are we, for instance, talking about groups of people who are autistic, because they are difficult and people do not want them in that situation, or are other groups included in that because it is not considered that they would benefit? Many people with quite alarming physical disabilities can swim—they can action in water. It might even be easier for them. What are we doing to make sure that they get access as well? It may be of even greater benefit to them than it is for people in the mainstream, because it may be an area of exercise that they can take safely once they have had that initial training. I hope the Minister will have an answer on that. If not, I hope he will write to me, because we should look at it.

I look forward to the Minister’s reply because this is something we should all be working together to achieve. I can see no party-political advantage in not achieving it.