By Helen
During the summer I organised a swimming sessions for the 11-15 year old young carers in the Lowestoft and coastal area at the Beccles Lido. I booked 10 tickets thinking they would get snapped up. Unfortunately, that was not the case I did not fill the 10 spaces.
After gaining feedback from parents about why their young carers had not engaged with this activity it became clear that many of the teenagers were either unable to swim, not confident at swimming or struggled with body confidence. This confirmed that there was a need in the area and sparked the idea of a swimming confidence course for the autumn term. I approached a few leisure centres and private swimming pools in the area and Waterlane Leisure Centre in Lowestoft was keen to support us in putting on a 4 week course to help a group of young carers improved their swimming confidence.
We had 5 young carers take part, aged between 10 and 14, with varying degrees of swimming ability, from a fairly good swimmer to being unable to swim at all.
At the start of the course I asked the young carers a few questions 3 out of the 5 young carers never go swimming and 2 did not feel confident at all. They were also asked what they were hoping to gain from the course, one wanted to ‘swim a length without touching the bottom’ another wanted ‘to learn how to swim’ and ‘being able to swim better’ and ‘to gain confidence and swim on my front.’ Throughout the 4 sessions it was clear to see the improvement made by all in the water, by the last session they were all having lots of fun in the water and able to float their front and back as well as receive an object from the bottom of the pool.
Following the completion of the course I asked a few questions and these showed that each felt they had made improvement in their swimming confidence. All young carers told me that they enjoyed the sessions, 3 felt more confident and 2 felt very confident, 3 said they were more likely to go swimming not and all 5 of them told me that they would be interested in more regular swimming lessons. It was great to see their confidence improve week to week and to hear that they would like to continue to learn to swim is great.
