Concern over number of children in North Yorkshire who can't swim
It's as a survey suggests it's one of the most important life skills
There are calls for more children in North Yorkshire to be taught to swim to save people from drowning.
It's as a new survey suggests swimming is the most important life skill we can teach our children – even more important than learning about first aid.
The survey also found 1 in 5 people found swimming more useful in their adult life than most other subjects like science (17%), computing (15%), and even sex education (8%).
And, with the summer holidays fast approaching, 71% of parents fear their children might drown abroad.
The study by Better1, to mark Drowning Prevention Week, highlighted how 42% were “very concerned” about the risk of drowning on a family holiday, more so than food poisoning (28%) or catching an illness (26%).
900 people on one waiting list
Chris Porter is the operations director at Tadcaster Swimming pool and says it's an essential skill: "Tadcaster specifically for us, the River Wharf runs through the Centre of Town, certainly in the Summer holidays you see a lot of children playing in and around the River, which is great but obviously there are some hidden dangers there."
But some families will struggle to access the pool because of long waiting lists: "Some of it is down to our own success, that we are a popular venue for our learn to swim programme but unfortunately level 1 which is age 4 and upwards which is kind of new to swimming and not very confident, we have 900 people just on that one list."
Chris says they are also still feeling the impact of the pandemic: "You have near enough got two years of backlog of people who couldn't attend or couldn't swim and obviously they couldn't get places straight away when covid lifted because people were already in swimming lessons and were still there, they hadn't moved on or got better."
There is also concern about a lack of swimming teachers: "The industry is trying to make a change, to make it more attractive and make it more of a career option, so that will come but obviously we are in that delayed period when it's a shortage of workforce and swimming pools which is a really challenging mix."