Fife councillors look at costs of bringing back lessons to teach kids to swim

Education Scrutiny committee unanimously agreed this week to establish a brand new working group to consider all of the options of reintroducing swim provision in schools across the Kingdom.

Some of the options come with a hefty price tag, but councillors from across the political spectrum agree that it’s something that the region must evaluate.

“I am really extremely concerned that a quarter of P7s in Fife cannot swim. That must improve,” Councillor Aude Boubaker-Calder (Lib-Dem for Dunfermline Central) said.

The committee report from Shelagh McLean, Fife’s head of education services, showed that, on average, 35% of children in Primary 4/5/6/7 identify as “non-swimmers”.

However, it would cost the council either £1.3 million to deliver 38 weeks of in school swimming for one primary year group or £900,000 to deliver 10 weeks for three primary year groups.

Cost is not the only barrier. Transport to and from pools would also present problems. Councillors were also told that providing one swim session per week would take children out of school for a minimum of 56 minutes. The maximum time out of school for swimming would be 118 minutes. Creating an in-school swimming provision would also require more staffing, which would in turn add to the overall cost for the council.

“We now have a scale of what the problem may look like,” Councillor Altany Craik (Labour for Glenrothes West and Kinglassie) said. “We need to find an option that starts to get us to the place where we think kids will be able to swim before they leave primary school.”

It was the second time the committee had seen a report from Ms McLean, exploring the various ways of putting swimming lessons back in the school curriculum.

Cllr Boubaker-Calder first raised the possibility in 2023. Her goal was to reintroduce school swim provision after it was removed from the curriculum in 2015 when the Scottish Government pulled funding from its £1.7m programme to support swimming lessons.

Councillor Julie Ford (SNP for Glenrothes West and Kinglassie) expressed more general concerns about taking children away from classrooms for lessons.

“I completely agree that it’s an important skill and there are opportunities lost to both children and adults who can’t swim,” she said. “However, I’m a bit concerned about kids being taken out of the classroom setting at the same time. It is difficult for teachers to catch these pupils up with lost learning. We would need more detail about how that would be managed to ensure they’re not losing literacy or numeracy experience and seeing the attainment gap potentially growing again.”

She added: “There are a lot of things that need to be considered before this can be decided.”

However, Cllr Craik said the “desire is clear”, and the elected member working group will be tasked with exploring more options and coming back with a recommendation for the Cabinet Committee sometime in the future.