[aspidistra]

> In the UK, learning to swim is part of the national curriculum, unlike the US.

More details on exactly what kids in the UK are taught:

Swimming and water safety: All schools must provide swimming instruction either in key stage 1 or key stage 2.

In particular, pupils should be taught to:

- swim competently, confidently and proficiently over a distance of at least 25 metres - use a range of strokes effectively [for example, front crawl, backstroke and breaststroke] - perform safe self-rescue in different water-based situations

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curricul...

Key Stage 1 = Years 1 and 2, so aged 5 to 7 years. Key Stage 2 = Years 3 to 6, so ages 7 to 11.

From my own experience 25 years ago that last bit, about safe self-rescue, involved:

* how to enter water safely if you need to (ie. jumping or lowering yourself in, when not to dive etc) * making floats out of clothing (ie. your old pyjama bottoms) * swimming underwater, including through hoops weighed down on the pool floor with bricks (presumably to mimic navigating tight flooded spaces) * treading water (for AGES) * mushroom floating (not sure if there's a technical term for this?) * how to recover somebody from the water

We went once a week to the council pool on the other side of town and pretty much everyone, all 30 of us, had learned all that by the time we finished and left for high school aged 11.

[jameshart]

And one key phrase in there that emphasizes a difference between the UK and US is "council pool". My experience in the US - even in Massachusetts where they actually have functioning local government and aren't too afraid of providing public services - is that providing a swimming pool is a pretty low priority for town government. Often a pool will be provided by the local school system, but access will still be based on a membership fee, which excludes a lot of people from access.

[aspidistra]

With the austerity measures in place in the UK in recent years there have been a few cases of despair at councils closing their swimming pools and leisure centres to try to cut costs. This is often despite fewer and fewer people attending them over the years.

Public swimming pools are a rich seam for nostalgia in Britain. Many public swimming pools were originally built in Victorian times and so fall into the "Always There" backdrop of a city, things you never really enthuse about but would miss if they were gone.

http://www.victoriansociety.org.uk/news/category/swimming-po...

Lidos, public outdoor pools, make up the other half of Swimming Pool Nostalgia. Most were built in the 1930s. They had already fallen out of fashion, really, when I was a kid -- since holidays abroad had become cheap -- but there was one quite near us, about 30 mins drive away, and going there was a bit of a treat.

There have been a few campaigns in recent years -- some successful -- to restore lidos or at least preserve them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_lidos_in_the_United_...

[jiggy2011]

Council pools will still charge membership fees or one off fees for use by non-members. Though these fees are probably somewhat cheaper than they would be if privately provided.

[jameshart]

One off fees are fine - my experience in the US is that pools that allow any non-member access are few and far between.

[kaitai]

In the US even when there are swimming lessons in schools, they're often dramatically understaffed (from my point of view) -- one teacher, no lifeguard, for 30 students. There are several recent incidents in the US of immigrant kids drowning in school lessons.

How was the staffing done at your school or elsewhere in the UK?

[aspidistra]

The class was usually split up in to groups of about 10, depending on age / proficiency. There'd be a teacher leading each group.

There would also be the lifeguards from the pool. If I remember rightly, this was at least two, if not more -- there always seemed to be one sitting up in the high chair, and there always seemed to be one patrolling the pool edge.

It was a 25m pool, and while the school was there it was closed to the wider public.

[k-mcgrady]

>> "We went once a week to the council pool on the other side of town and pretty much everyone, all 30 of us, had learned all that by the time we finished and left for high school aged 11."

I had the same experience. Even the people that had a fear of water/drowning could swim at a basic level without assistance. I think we got a 1 hour lesson per week for around 8 weeks a year for 2 or 3 years.