Shropshire Star comment: Swimming importance still so high
Learning to swim is a health and safety issue.
Safety is the traditional good reason for encouraging children to learn to swim and is one that still applies in full measure.
These days though, with the looming childhood obesity crisis, the health benefits of swimming have risen in importance.
She puts her finger on a number of factors, including the number of sports youngsters do these days leaving them with no time for swimming, and parents being so busy.
But another reason, she says, is that swimming pools are closing all over the country.
Rebecca was in Shrewsbury to open a new spa at a health club, but it is the way of the world now that as Shropshire sees the advent of one new community asset, others are under threat, and this includes leisure centres and swimming pools where a cloud of uncertainty has gathered over their futures.
In the county town there is a continuing debate about the future of swimming provision now that the Quarry pool is ageing and in need of replacement. There are opposing views over whether replacing it with a pool away from the town centre would result in more, or less, use.
For children of the learn-to-swim age they have to have adults with them, and here the record levels of employment which are generally trumpeted as a good thing do have an effect in that those mums and dads do not have lots of free time in which to take their children to the local pool.
There are tens of thousands of Salopians today who learned to swim with the incentive of the Star Swimmers scheme, which we at the Shropshire Star ran for many years. We’d like to think that some still cherish their badge and certificate awarded for completing their first length.
Our scheme was given impetus by some terrible tragedies.
The number of lives saved by Star Swimmers and other swimming initiatives is incalculable, but for the sake of today’s children we cannot afford the gains to be lost as people start forgetting the importance and status of swimming as a skill and swimming pools as a resource.
Supporting swimming costs money, but childhood obesity is a timebomb which could bankrupt the NHS, and for a child to drown because he or she never had the opportunity to learn to swim is a cost no family should have to pay.
