**BOOKINGS NOW CLOSED**
WHAT IS IT ABOUT?
Swim Cheltenham has been born out of the success of the Heidi’s Heroes programme with the aspiration to further enhance the support for primary school aged children around water safety and confidence
This swimming intervention programme is primarily for year 5 and 6 pupils that have displayed nervousness or lack of confidence or unsafe behaviour around water during school swimming lessons.
THE PROGRAMME:
We have 3 programmes running in Cheltenham at different dates and locations. All of them take place from a Monday to Friday every day and it is important that you please choose a week where you have no conflicting Y5 or Y6 school events or inset days in your diary that may prevent the children’s full daily attendance. Hopefully by offering this additional flexibility to schools, the children will get the full benefit from the programme by attending all 5 lessons.
Lessons will be capped at 14 students to a lesson this time to ensure the quality of the teaching across the programme is at a high. They criteria for the programme has also shifted this year to a more niche selection of students who need to improve their confidence and safety around water (rather than improving distance and swimming stamina). If children can swim unaided for 3 or more meters and are able to float on their back then we encourage schools to not enter them into this programme and prioritise those that fall into one of the 3 categories below.
Children are invited from years 5 and 6 to attend a daily half hour swimming lesson with one of our qualified swimming instructors. This week long, daily swimming programme is designed to significantly boost a child’s swimming safety and confidence in and around the water. To help you identify these children, we have outlined three categories that they may fall into:
Category 1
Nervous of entering water safely, lifting feet off the floor or letting go of the side.
Nervous of jumping in and returning to the wall, putting face in the water or blowing bubbles in the water.
Requires a lot of physical and verbal encouragement or one to one support.
Category 2
Confident in water and willing to try but unable to safely float on their front or back even with a floating aid
Confident but unable to kick with woggle, a float or on their back with arms by sides.
Unable to perform safe self-rescue in a pool situation.
Category 3
Can travel 3m+ distance WITH a floating aid
Can confidently jump in and get out of a pool
Unable to travel 3m+ without a floating aid
COURSE DATES & VENUES:
31st March – 4th April 2025 @ Dean Close School, Hatherley Road, Cheltenham GL51 6EP (AM ONLY)
7th April – 11th April 2025 @ CLC Health and Fitness Centre, Malvern Road, Cheltenham GL50 2NX **(FULLY BOOKED)**
30th June – 4th July 2025 @ Cheltenham College, Thirlestaine Rd, Cheltenham GL53 7AB
REGISTRATION:
Schools are now invited to register for the forthcoming Heidi’s Heroes swimming programme 2025! This will give us an idea of overall numbers and ability for us to be able to prioritise placements.
Registration will take place in 2 stages.
Stage One – please complete your schools registration form below.
Stage Two – we will contact you to confirm your school’s number of placements within the programme. At this point you will be asked to submit a register of pupils, and put them in order of ability / confidence so that we can accurately group them into abilities on Monday when we run our initial assessment.
If you are able to provide your own transportation, please do so.
We will try to ensure that as many core membership schools as possible can access the intervention, prioritising categories starting with those pupils with the greatest need i.e. starting with Category 1.
With limited resources and high numbers of pupils expected, there may be a limit to the number of pupils being accommodated per school.
HOW TO APPLY:
Please fill out the registration form below.