The Road to Swim 21 Accreditation

Redditch Swimming Club has recently been awarded both ASA Swim 21 and Sport England ClubMark accreditation.  Several months of hard work by the Club’s Swim 21 team have finally been rewarded, with the confirmation that our recent application has been approved and we are now officially a Swim 21 Skill Development Club (Silver Standard).

In practice this means that Redditch Swimming Club is now recognised by the ASA, Sport England and local authorities as a club that provides a safe, effective and child-friendly environment for children and young people.  Our success in becoming one of the first two swimming clubs in Worcestershire (along with Wyre Forest) to achieve Swim 21 accreditation should open up new opportunities for recruitment, funding and training of teachers and coaches.

To achieve accreditation, the Club has had to undertake a detailed audit of all of our activities – under the headings of Swimmer Development, Teacher/Coach Development, Club Management and Partnerships.  As part of this audit process, the RSC Swim 21 team, led by Chris Britt and Julie Edwards, identified several areas that required further work to bring us up to the minimum standard required.  One of these areas was land training.  The Club’s land training programme had been ‘suspended’ a couple of years earlier, after the closure of Bridley Moor School – and all efforts to find an alternative location had failed.  However, with some assistance from the local Sports Development Officer, Jo Bevan, we managed to hire a sports hall at St Augustine’s School and, at the last minute, found a trainer.  Thanks to the excellent efforts of our new trainer, Chris O’Sullivan, land training became one of three elements in our Swim 21 submission to receive commendation as an ‘example of good practice’ and our Tuesday evening land training sessions have since proved to be a huge success.

The other two aspects of our submission that were noted as examples of good practice by the Swim 21 District Assessment Panel were our club handbook/welcome pack for new members and the in-house training in child protection, provided for our young poolside helpers.  With regard to the child protection training, the SportsCoach UK training course on ‘Good Practice in Child Protection’, which all adult teachers and helpers have attended (again as part of the Swim 21 process) was considered by the trainer to be possibly unsuitable for young people below the age of 16.  However, we regarded it as important that even our 14 and 15-year-old ASA-qualified Helpers received some training on this issue.  We were very fortunate to have a child protection specialist, Julie Harris, among the parents at the Club and she very kindly offered to provide a short training session for those concerned.

We have already begun to move Redditch Swimming Club further forward, with initiatives such as the recent Swimming Festival at Hewell Road Pool and plans to further the qualifications of most of our Teachers and Helpers.  The Swimming Festival, which was run with the help of Active Sports and local Redditch Borough Council staff, brought together 20 promising youngsters from the council learn-to-swim programme.  The majority have since progressed to a series of Development Camps, from which we hope that several will then move into our Development Squad.  At the second camp, on Sunday 14 March, the young swimmers had the tremendous bonus of some coaching from Redditch Swimming Club’s very own ex-Olympic swimmer, Jamie Salter.

What’s next?  Well we have put together an ambitious, but achievable action plan – to carry us towards the opening of the planned new facilities at the Abbey Stadium, which should provide the state-of-the-art competition pool that is appropriate for a forward-looking club such as ours.  We also have plans to apply for accreditation as a Swim 21 Teaching Club and to move up to the Gold Standard for Skill Development.

Watch this space!