Dean Kent: Teach our kids to swim and save lives

Dean Kent (pictured) wants to see schools team up with swim schools to get children in the water and learning how to swim properly. Photo / Martin Sykes

About this time every summer, I start to worry. It's a beautiful time of year but I know that it's just a matter of weeks before the first drowning stories start coming in.

Every time I read of a drowning I remember a day early in my first paid summer as a surf lifesaver.

I was 15 and working at Waitarere Beach near my hometown of Levin. It was a stunner - bright sun and blue skies - but it was the day after a storm and the sea was still pretty rough. I watched from the tower as two girls with boogie boards entered the water and then, within minutes, got swept out to sea.

There was another lifeguard patrolling by the water: neither of us hesitated and we ran into the surf. We reached the first girl and I pressed on to the second - she was close to going under and the look of terror in her eyes is something I will never forget. I've talked to other surf lifesavers and everyone agrees. That look changes you.

What scares me each summer is that as the weather heats up, Kiwis head to beaches, lakes and rivers, but we're completely ill-equipped to do so.

Last year, 99 people drowned in New Zealand, the second-lowest toll since 1980. We still have little to congratulate ourselves on.

Drowning is the third-highest cause of accidental death in New Zealand. Maori and Pacific people are over-represented in drowning statistics; so are those aged 15 to 24. Men feature prominently. What this tells us is that us Kiwis are simply not as good at swimming as we think we are.

Scarily, everything points to these statistics getting worse.

Around the country, 300 schools closed their pools between 2001 and 2008. For the past two years, the national curriculum has not required schools to teach swimming and trainee teachers no longer learn to teach it.

The result? Water Safety New Zealand has found that only one in five New Zealand 10-year-olds was able to swim 200m freestyle, breathing correctly - the benchmark for improving your chances in the water. Just half could swim 25m. Among 12-year-olds, a third were unable to swim even 25m. Those children would be in grave danger in all but the calmest of water.

We are gambling with lives - and not just our own, but those of lifeguards and surf lifesavers around the country.

I don't blame teachers though. How do you keep 30 children with wildly different skill levels under close watch in the water? It only takes three minutes and a child could drown. Why should teachers be asked to take that risk?

What's more, asking teachers to teach swimming assumes they are confident in the water. Our drowning statistics and our changing demographics suggest otherwise.

What we need is a concerted, national effort to get children into formal swimming lessons. Learning in the school pool is better than nothing but remember, those aged 15 to 24 who are over-represented in the drowning statistics probably learned to swim in the days when schools ran swimming lessons. It's just not enough.

Most children, on average, have four to six lessons a year, which is barely enough for them to be competent in calm water such as a swimming pool or sheltered beach - let alone a wild west-coast beach or open water if they were tipped out of a boat far from shore.

What I'd like to see, at the very least, is a programme where schools and swim schools work together. The students could spend two days in a classroom each year learning water safety from professionals, followed by 10 consecutive lessons at an accredited swim school, followed by two days at a beach with a surf lifesaving club.

This is the bare minimum to be safe around relatively calm water - and our children need a great deal more if they're to swim at surf beaches or in fast-running rivers.

The advantages of a professional teacher are enormous. Pupils are placed with other children of a comparable level where they feel comfortable, there are rarely more than 10 in a class and they learn correct stroke progression, so they don't learn bad habits that might cause injury in the future.

Expensive? Not really. Swim schools don't actually make much money out of their school programmes - they're more of a community service.

The largest cost for schools that take their children to accredited swim schools is, in fact, the cost of transport. On the other hand, the medical and societal costs of drowning are enormous.

Ultimately parents have a part to play too. Even after-school lessons are relatively inexpensive. If you can afford to buy a beer or a packet of cigarettes a week, you can afford to give your children swimming lessons. Besides, what cost do we put on a child's life?

Enrol them today: they'll enjoy it, they'll become more confident and you might just save their life.

* Dean Kent is the Head of Swimming at the Northern Arena and a three-time New Zealand Olympic swimmer.