[Torchwatch]

In Britain the swimming instructors that do schools sessions are often senior life guards who are offered swimming teacher training as an extension of their role in a sports centre. The same instructors will also do the Adult Learn to Swim courses in the evenings.

If you book your child into swimming lessons in the evenings the chances are that the teacher will working for the swimming club which has hired the pool for lessons. Your child will progress through various swim cap colours and do Personal Survival and Lifesaving training along the way, but the objective is to produce fit and fast young swimmers with proficient stroke development who can pass seamlessly from swimming lessons to coached swimming race training.

Young swimmers who are promoted from lessons to training squads must perform or they will be culled from the squad as there is always demand for places.

The adult swimming classes will teach you to swim a width or even a length but then they will drop you. They will teach you a basic breast stroke and front crawl so you can swim through water so that when you turn up at the pool on your own the lifeguards can leave you to slowly plod up and down the pool on your own.

There are masters squads attached to swimming clubs, they consist of older swimmers who have never left the club, squad swimmers who had dropped out and want another go as adults and adult swimmers who have not gone through the club lessons/coaching system but are largely self taught. A Masters Coach will work on stroke improvement and introduce swimmers to new strokes such as butterfly, but you have to be a strong swimmer before a Masters squad will accept you, I'd reached 3000m and doing 45m underwater before I was invited to join a masters squad.

The other adult swimming lessons are for lifesaving, but to get an RLSS Bronze Medallion (or current equivalent) you have to swim out and return towing a body. Your swimming has to be good before you start the course.

The level of swimming that you have currently achieved means that you are safe in any part of a swimming pool but should probably stay within your depth or close to the wall when out of your depth. Go swimming and practice swimming from the shallow end to a point where you are comfortably standing on the bottom, rest if you need to then swim back, keep doing it and let your comfortable spot drift a little further and deeper over time. When you feel ready to swim a whole length, from the deep end and away from the wall let the lifeguard know what you plan to do, he/she will be on your side as they watch you do it.

You are a little far from me here in Kent, maybe next year I should organise a Swim Suit Board Camp near a nice beach where we can wear our speedos in the sunshine and a swimming pool where we can swim. learn or just play.