Swimming is the only sport that saves lives. Why have we stopped teaching it?

In May, we learned police had recovered a body in the search for 11-year-old Mackenzie Swift, who went missing from a river in South Yorkshire.

The deadliness of the heat spell has sparked warnings about the dangers of open-water swimming and the risk of cold-water shock.

But the young age of so many victims also points to a crisis which has been slowly building over the last 15 years - the gradual disappearance of many of the country’s public swimming pools.

More than 500 public pools have closed since 2010, thanks to a combination of crippling energy costs and squeezed council budgets.

The decline has accelerated even further since the pandemic, when energy bills shot up, with 76% of water space lost over the last 15 years disappearing since 2020.

The fact that many public pools were built in the 1960s and ‘70s doesn’t help either.  Many now require hefty repair work as they near the end of their lifespan, which cash-strapped councils can’t afford.

In Stroud, residents have been campaigning to save a beloved 1930s-era lido from closure, as the council faces a £5m repair bill to make it safe.

The cost of a swimming session at the pools that do remain has become gradually more expensive.  The average swim session in the UK at a public pool cost £3.25 in 2010, rising to 5.80 in 2025, a 78% increase, while average wages barely moved at all.

Eighty per cent of children in the UK learn to swim in their local leisure centre.  Without public pools to swim in, where can children learn?

The answer is that many aren’t.

Swimming is the only sport included in the national PE curriculum, and children are required to be able to swim 25m unaided by the time they leave primary school.

However, a survey by Sport England found that almost 30% of children in Year 7 could not swim 25 metres independently in 2024, which was up from 27% in 2017/18.

Pool closures leave many primary schools without a nearby pool where children can learn to swim.  Swimming lessons are also expensive: schools have to pay to hire out the pool for lessons, in addition to paying for swimming instructors and a lifeguard.

The inclusion of swimming in the PE curriculum points to something more fundamental - we view swimming primarily as physical exercise.  Swimming is indeed excellent for physical and mental health - but we seem to forget that it is the only sport that can save lives.

We need to see more money invested in maintaining public pools if we want to reverse the decline in swimming lessons. Otherwise, if the number of children leaving school unable to swim continues to grow, we’re going to see more tragedies like those which unfolded over the May Bank holiday weekend.

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Issy Clarke is a journalist at LBC.

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