Water Safety in South Waikato Schools District
The South Waikato Primary and Intermediate Schools currently form two separate clusters working with Sport Waikato through the principles of Healthy Active Learning.
The Putaruru cluster currently comprises of 5 schools and the Tokoroa cluster has 11 schools. The school’s equity index range is from 463-539.
There are approximately 2400 students enrolled in these schools from year 1 to year 8.
The Equity index (EQI) is a statistical model that estimates the extent to which students face socio-economic barriers to achievement at school.
As part of gathering insights at the beginning of working alongside the schools, Sport Waikato was able to identify that there was a need to support the development of teaching staff with new knowledge and access to resources for delivering aquatic education as part of a requirement within the Physical Education curriculum setting.
A further challenge that was identified was that most of the schools did not have their own pools and did not have sufficient funding to pay for the transport or the entry costs for participants to the Council pool.
The Health and Physical Education Curriculum expects that all students will have had opportunities to learn basic aquatic skills by the end of year 6. Sport Waikato had discussions with Swimming Waikato about what support could look like for any schools that would like to prioritise a focus on Aquatic Education.
With the support of funding from Water Safety NZ and Tū Manawa, Swimming Waikato was able to create a package that included a whole staff teacher workshop utilising the Water Skills for Life and Kia Manu Kia Ora resources, transport costs and pool entry for students to experience 5 water safety sessions.
This funding was capped and required a couple of the larger schools to top it up through their Ministry of Education operation funding. Swimming Waikato also supported the training of South Waikato District Council pool staff to deliver the water skills for life programme. This ensured that the initiative could be led locally through existing staff.
What students said about what they enjoyed and learnt about water safety:
As this has been a pilot project due to the nature of the number of schools all participating within a community, it has been important to try to capture as much evidence as possible from Kaiako and Tamariki through surveys pre and post the initiative.
The data that was gathered from the surveys reflect positively the changes that happened in building teachers’ capability through increasing their knowledge and confidence in delivering water safety lessons.
A key focus of this project has been to ensure that the 102 teachers are actively engaged with the lessons delivered by instructors. Whenever possible, this includes having the teachers deliver components of the lessons themselves.
What teachers said about what they enjoyed and learnt about water safety:
The data also highlighted the quality learning experiences of the 1,965 students, showing an extremely high enjoyment level of 91%.
The overall aim has always been about teachers being able to teach the water safety content themselves with little or no need for external instructors.
Year two will focus on teachers who now have enough confidence to deliver the water safety content themselves, to do that without the support of the instructors as well as any new teachers or those that still require support to still receive this through the instructors.
The schools have also expressed a keen interest in wanting to scaffold the aquatic education learning experience for the students with progressions to the teaching of basic stroke development alongside of the strong water safety focus. Swimming Waikato has developed a resource that will help schools to be able to do this through a series of 10 lessons across each year level.
