I Don't Call Myself a Swimming Teacher Any More — And Here's Why

I want to be honest with you about something I've been sitting with for a while.

I don't teach swimming to young children any more. Not really. And I haven't for some time.

That might sound like a strange thing for someone who has spent thirty years in aquatic education to say. But stay with me, because this is not a story about walking away from the water. It is a story about finally understanding what I was doing there in the first place.

The label we inherited

Swimming teacher. It is the title the industry gave us, and most of us have worn it without question. We completed our qualification, we stood at the poolside, and we got on with the job of teaching children to swim.

But what does that phrase actually mean — teaching children to swim?

In practice, it means teaching children to perform strokes. To move through water in a recognised, technically correct way. To achieve badges that confirm they can travel a short distance, put their face in, or push and glide from a wall. The industry built itself around this framework, and for decades, parents enrolled their children in lessons because swimming — defined this way — felt like a measurable goal with a clear endpoint.

I understand why it happened. I just don't think it served children as well as we believed it did.

What the data tells us — and why it should stop us in our tracks

Here is where I want to slow down and ask you to sit with some numbers. Because this is not abstract.

88% of children who drown had at least one adult present. Nearly 70% of toddler drownings occur during non-swim time — when children unexpectedly access water.

Read that again. The adults were there. It was not lesson time. The child had not gone looking for the water. And it happened anyway.

Now consider the teenagers. Every summer in the UK, the same story unfolds with devastating regularity. Cold water shock — not inability to swim — is identified as the primary mechanism of accidental drowning in UK open water, triggered by sudden immersion in water below 15°C. Many UK inland waters remain below 15°C even during summer months. Cold water shock causes an involuntary gasp and rapid breathing that can prevent someone from keeping their airway clear and may cause immediate panic or loss of swimming ability — even in hot weather, when the water below the surface remains very cold.

These are not children who could not swim. Many of them could. They had completed lessons. Some had certificates.

People who drown are not necessarily poor swimmers. The combination of hot weather, cold water, and often the influence of a few beers can render anyone incapable of surviving.

This is the gap the industry created and never adequately addressed. We spent years teaching children to travel 10 metres in a warm, still, predictable pool. We did not spend enough time teaching them what water actually does to a body that enters it unprepared — cold, uncontrolled, in an unfamiliar environment, without supervision.

As I write this, at least eleven people have died after getting into difficulty in open water during the UK's record-breaking May heatwave — nine of them children and teenagers — all within a single week. The RLSS has warned that when air temperatures reach 25°C, the accidental drowning risk is five times higher, and that teenagers and young adults are proportionately more likely to lose their lives. The figure is still rising as coroners conclude their work.

These young people, in many cases, could swim. They had probably sat through a swimming lesson at some point. They may have earned a badge.

But they did not know what cold water shock would do to their body the moment they hit the surface. They did not have the self-regulation to float and wait. They did not have Water Wisdom.

That is not their failure. It is the industry's.

The badge that means less than we think

Let me be specific, because this is not a vague critique.

To achieve the Swim England Learn to Swim Stage 3 award — one of the most widely used benchmarks in UK swimming lessons — a child must be able to jump in from the poolside and submerge; push and glide on their front and back; travel 10 metres on their front and back without support; perform a tuck float for three seconds; pick up an object from the pool floor; and correctly identify three of the four key water safety messages.

It is a real achievement. It represents effort, growing confidence, and genuine progress in the water.

But here is what it does not measure: whether that child understands what cold water does to their body. Whether they can regulate their breathing under sudden immersion. Whether they can think clearly when fear overrides technique. Whether they know how to choose to float — not perform a float in a lesson, but reach for it instinctively when panic is pulling them under.

A child can earn Stage 3 having swum just 10 metres — in a warm pool, with no current, no cold water, no depth variation, knowing exactly where the wall is. When a parent watches their child receive that badge, the message they receive — however unintentionally — is that their child is making progress towards being safe in water. What the badge cannot tell them is how much further there still is to go, and how differently water behaves the moment it stops being supervised.

Ticking the box that a child has reached Stage 3 is not irrelevant. It is simply incomplete. And the incompleteness carries a cost — because it can close the conversation before it should ever close.

Water Wisdom cannot be certified in a leisure centre pool. It has to be built — slowly, progressively, across years of purposeful experience.

The question we forgot to ask

The swimming lesson industry is exceptionally good at measuring what children can do. Can they submerge? Can they travel 10 metres? Can they identify the Water Safety Code?

It has been far less good at asking what children are becoming.

Not what skills they can perform under supervised, warm, predictable conditions — but what kind of relationship they are building with water over the course of their childhood. What instincts are forming. What self-awareness is developing. What they will carry with them to the riverbank at sixteen that no badge can measure and no certificate can confirm.

Reframing a lesson from "what skills are we covering today" to "what are we producing in this child" is not a small shift. It changes what you notice, what you prioritise, what you celebrate, and what you worry about.

It also changes who you are as a professional.

That is the reframe I am asking for. Not a new qualification. Not a new scheme of work. A new question — asked every single time you stand at the poolside.

What am I producing here?

What young children actually need

Here is what thirty years of working with young children in water has taught me: the early years are not the time to teach swimming. Not in the way the industry has traditionally framed it.

Young children are not small adults. Their nervous systems are still forming. Their relationship with their bodies is still being written. Their understanding of risk, environment, and physical cause-and-effect is developing in real time. What they need from water, in those earliest years, is not instruction in technique. It is something altogether more foundational.

They need to feel the water before they are asked to conquer it.

They need to explore movement before they are corrected into it.

They need to build a relationship with an environment that — if we are honest — is not natural to them. Not yet.

This is why I stopped calling myself a swimming teacher and started calling myself something different: an Aquatic Play Practitioner.

What that actually means

I am not rebranding for the sake of it. The title shift reflects a genuine philosophical one.

My work with young children is not about skills acquisition. It is about building the internal architecture that makes skills meaningful later. I work to develop children who are SMART in and around water — self-aware, masters of their own movement, able to anticipate what water will do, respectful of it, and trusting of their own bodies within it.

That is a very different outcome from can travel 10 metres in a pool.

The Pathway to Water Wisdom is what I am working towards with every child I teach. Water Wisdom is not a badge. It is not a distance swum or a stroke achieved. It is the state in which a child — and eventually an adult — can think, respond, and adapt in any water environment. It is the outcome that actually keeps people safe.

Skills without wisdom are fragile. A child who has learned to perform a front crawl in a warm, still, supervised pool has not necessarily developed the awareness, the calm, or the self-regulation to respond safely when they fall into a cold river. A child who has been guided through the Pathway to Water Wisdom has something more durable: a relationship with water that is built on understanding, not performance.

The survival swimming problem

Now I want to address something that has grown significantly in other parts of the world, and is beginning to make its presence felt here.

The survival swimming movement — and the franchise model it has spawned — starts from a genuine place. Drowning kills children. Parents are frightened. Someone found a way to condition very young infants, some as young as six months old, to roll onto their backs and float if they enter the water.

I understand the impulse entirely.

But the implementation is where it fractures.

ISR — Infant Swimming Resource — teaches children as young as six months old a self-rescue technique. According to ISR's own description, children aged six months to one year learn to roll onto their backs to float, rest, and breathe, maintaining that position until help arrives. The videos are dramatic. Some parents find them compelling. Others find them, in their own words, hard to watch.

ISR's core conviction is that the child is the most important part of a drowning prevention strategy — but putting the onus of drowning prevention on an infant is, as one critic put it, more than a bit ridiculous.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has not endorsed such lessons, and at the time of recent review there was no scientific data available to support any specific benefit of ISR. ISR's website does not cite a single independent study to support its claims, nor does it provide peer-reviewed research confirming that ISR-trained infants retain these skills long-term.

And then there is the question of what the process does to a child's relationship with water.

There is evidence suggesting that the tactics used in survival swimming programmes may create traumatic associations, with older children developing negative thoughts or fears about water as a result. Experts have pointed out that no one can be "drown-proofed", and leading parents to believe their child is no longer at risk for drowning by participating in any swim programme is irresponsible and unethical.

This matters to me deeply. Because the entire foundation of the Pathway to Water Wisdom is that a child's relationship with water is built on trust — on curiosity, on a gradual and supported process of becoming competent and confident. A method that conditions survival responses through distress — however well-intentioned — does not build that relationship. It bypasses it. And the child who learns to float through fear is not on the Pathway to Water Wisdom. They are surviving water, not understanding it.

There is a profound difference between those two things.

Why this is a problem the industry created

I want to be clear: I am not criticising the people who have taught — and continue to teach — swimming to children. Most of them are dedicated, skilled, and genuinely committed professionals who work within the system they were trained into.

The issue is the system itself.

When the industry defined its product as swimming lessons, it set itself up to answer the wrong question. Parents came asking "will my child be safe in water?" and the industry responded with "we will teach them to swim." Those are not the same thing. Safety in water is not primarily a technical skill. It is a relationship, a set of instincts, an embodied understanding of risk and response.

By centring stroke development and distance targets, the industry accidentally sidelined the work that matters most in early childhood — the slow, play-driven, developmentally appropriate process of becoming water-wise. And in the gap it left, survival swimming franchises stepped in with a different answer: we will condition your child to save themselves.

Neither answer is enough. Both are solving the wrong problem.

The right problem is this: how do we build, over the course of a childhood, human beings who understand water? Who respect it not out of fear but out of knowledge? Who carry that understanding with them to the riverbank at sixteen, not just to the leisure centre at six?

What changes when you shift the frame

When I began describing my work differently — as developing SMART swimmers on a Pathway to Water Wisdom — something shifted, not just in how others perceived the work, but in how I understood it myself.

I stopped apologising for the pace of progress. Young children move through water familiarisation at the pace their nervous system dictates, not at the pace a badge system demands. When the outcome is Water Wisdom rather than a swimming certificate, there is room for that.

I stopped treating play as a vehicle for getting to the "real" lesson. Play is the real lesson. Purposeful, carefully designed aquatic play is the most developmentally appropriate and neurologically effective way to build water competence in young children. It is not warm-up. It is not filler. It is the whole point.

I started seeing myself — and expecting others to see me — as a professional whose work sits at the intersection of child development, environmental awareness, movement science, and public health. Because that is what this work actually is.

The question I want to leave you with

The eleven people who died in UK open water this week — the majority of them children and teenagers — were not all poor swimmers. They were victims of a gap between what swimming lessons teach and what water actually demands.

That gap has a name. It is the absence of Water Wisdom.

If you are a swimming teacher reading this, I am not asking you to change your job title tomorrow. I am asking you to consider what title you would give yourself if you designed it from scratch — from your values, from your understanding of children, from what you know now that you did not know when you first qualified.

Would it still be swimming teacher?

For me, it is not. It has not been for some time.

I am an Aquatic Play Practitioner. I guide children along the Pathway to Water Wisdom. I do not teach young children the skills of swimming, because in the early years, those skills are not yet the point.

The point is the child. Their relationship with water. Their growing sense of themselves within it.

The point — always — is Water Wisdom.

And the teenager standing at the edge of a river in May, deciding whether to jump, needed Water Wisdom far more than they ever needed to travel 10 metres in a pool.

---

If you want to explore what this looks like in practice

The Architecture of Early Years Swim Lessons is a live online session on Sunday 14th June at 2pm.

Two hours looking at why traditional lesson structures struggle to produce water-wise swimmers — and what it actually means to design a lesson around the child rather than the skill.

This is not a webinar. It is a working session, with space to think, question, and leave with a different way of seeing what happens in your lessons.

£47. Replay available for 48 hours.

Sign me up

---

References & Further Reading

Statistics correct at time of publication: 30 May 2026. Drowning figures for the May 2026 heatwave period are based on confirmed reports at the time of writing and may increase as coroner conclusions become available.

Drowning statistics — UK

• National Water Safety Forum / Water Incident Database (WAID). (2025). UK Accidental Water Fatalities 2024.Published via University of Portsmouth. Available at: port.ac.uk

• National Child Mortality Database. (2025). Child Drowning Deaths in England: 1 April 2019 to 31 March 2024.Available at: ncmd.info

• Royal Life Saving Society UK. (2024). Child Drowning Update: England, September 2024. Available at: rlss.org.uk

• Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA). (2025). World Drowning Prevention Day — Young People and Open Water. Available at: rospa.com

• Online CPD Academy. (2026). Drowning and Water Safety Statistics UK: The Definitive Guide. Available at: onlinecpdacademy.co.uk

• The Water Incident Research Hub (WIRH). (2022). UK Statistics for Drowning Fatalities by Age and Sex.Available at: thewirh.com

• ITV News. (28 May 2026). Boy, 14, becomes 11th person to die in open water incidents during record heatwave.Available at: itv.com

• WION News. (28 May 2026). UK heatwave triggers water safety alert after nine drowning deaths as temperature hits record highs. Available at: wionews.com

Drowning statistics — global

• World Health Organization. (December 2024). Drowning: Key Facts. Available at: who.int

• World Health Organization. (2024). Global Status Report on Drowning Prevention 2024. Available at: who.int

• Pan American Health Organization / WHO. (December 2024). Drowning Deaths Decline Globally but the Most Vulnerable Remain at Risk. Available at: paho.org

• United Nations. World Drowning Prevention Day. Available at: un.org

Drowning statistics — children and toddlers

• National Drowning Prevention Alliance (NDPA). Drowning Facts and Data. Available at: ndpa.org

• Safe Kids Worldwide, cited in Stop Drowning Now. Drowning Statistics. Available at: stopdrowningnow.org

• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). (2024). Vital Signs: Drowning Increases in the US. Available at: cdc.gov

Cold water shock

• National Water Safety Forum / RLSS UK. Respect the Water Campaign. Available at: nationalwatersafety.org.uk

• BBC News. The Hidden Dangers of Summertime Swims. Available at: bbc.co.uk

Swim England Learn to Swim Framework

• Swim England. Learn to Swim Stage 3 Award. Available at: swimming.org

• Swim England. Learn to Swim Framework Stages 1–7. Available at: swimming.org

Survival swimming / ISR

• ABC News / Good Morning America. (July 2022). Country Music Star Shines Spotlight on Controversial Drowning Prevention Technique. Available at: abcnews.go.com

• Science-Based Medicine. (July 2021). Summer is Here, and Infant Swimming Programs are Still Unproven.Available at: sciencebasedmedicine.org

• DanSwim. (August 2024). Drowning Prevention or Trauma? The Science Behind ISR Swim Lessons. Available at: danswim.com

• Sunsational Swim School. ISR Infant Self Rescue vs Traditional Swim Lessons. Available at: sunsationalswimschool.com

• Fox News / The Times of London. (July 2017). Self-Rescue Swimming Classes for Toddlers Condemned as Traumatic. Available at: foxnews.com