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Oct 16
0

Safe Swimming Series: Safety at the Beach

By | General, Learn to Swim and Dive | No Comments

Safe Swimming Series: Safety at the Beach

A family beach holiday can turn from fun to frightening in seconds. One day the water is calm and shallow, the next day the tide has changed, the waves are stronger, and conditions are completely different. Children don’t notice these changes, but parents and carers must. Sadly, every summer in Australia, families face tragedy when beach conditions catch swimmers off guard.

Each year, hundreds of drownings occur, and most happen at beaches, during holidays, in summer. The good news is that many of these incidents are preventable with awareness, preparation, and respect for the ocean.

357 drowning deaths were recorded across Australia—a figure 27% higher than the 10-year average. Almost half of these tragedies happened at the coast: 43% (154 deaths) occurred in coastal locations, with 82 drowning deaths (23%) taking place at beaches.

Start with the Right Beach

Choose a beach that suits your child’s age and ability. For young kids, look for a gentle slope, shallow water, and minimal waves. Avoid rocks, strong currents, or hidden hazards. You can check the hazard rating of any beach at beachsafe.org.au.

Respect the Ocean

The ocean is powerful and ever-changing—it is not a swimming pool. Teach children from their very first beach visit to respect the sea, and remind older kids, teens, and adults that conditions can change quickly.

Key Rules for Water Safety

  • Never turn your back on the sea. Always face the waves.
  • Stay close to shore. It’s safer and easier to get help if needed.
  • Never swim alone. Swim with friends or family who can help in an emergency.
  • Touch supervision for young children. Always keep kids under five within arm’s reach and children under ten in sight.
  • Permission before paddling. Kids should always ask an adult before entering the water.
  • Floatation devices doesn’t equal supervision. Lifejackets add protection but don’t replace active adult supervision.
  • Know CPR — in an emergency, you’re likely to be the first responder, and having CPR skills can make all the difference in achieving a positive outcome.

For Teens and Adults: Know Your Limits

  • Know your limits.  Overconfidence can be dangerous. Don’t enter the water unless you’re sure you can handle the conditions. Even strong swimmers can get into trouble.

Safety at the Beach

  • Read beach signage. Look for warnings about rocks, rips, or marine life.
  • Swim between the red and yellow flags. Not one drowning has occurred between the flags at a patrolled Victorian beach (National Drowning Report 2024).
  • Check conditions. Watch for changes in weather, wind, or storms.

If you find yourself at an unpatrolled beach, ask: Is this sensible? Is it safe? What will happen if we get into trouble? If in doubt—don’t swim.

Understanding Rip Currents

Rips are the most common beach hazard in Australia. They are powerful, fast-flowing currents that drag swimmers away from shore.

If caught in a rip:

  1. Stay calm—rips don’t pull you under.
  2. Float with the current. Don’t fight it.
  3. Signal for help by raising your arm.
  4. Strong swimmers may escape by swimming parallel to the shore.
  5. Remember: there are no rips between the flags at patrolled beaches.

Extra Safety Reminders

  • Protect yourself from the sun and drink plenty of water.
  • Avoid alcohol and drugs—they contribute to beach drownings.
  • Be aware of marine life like stingrays, jellyfish, and sharks, and check signage for warnings.

At Surrey Park Swimming, water safety—including beach safety—is part of our messaging and skills taught. By combining swimming skills with water awareness, we give children and families the tools to enjoy the water safely—at the pool, the lake, or the beach.

Jul 26
0

Surrey Park Short Course Meet

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The 2025 Surrey Park Swimming Short Course Meet, another sensational swim meet ticked off the calendar.

With 209 swimmers hitting the water it was wonderful to see so many clubs joining us and displaying incredible team spirit, energy, and determination. A huge thank you to our wonderful volunteers, parents and coaches for making the day such a success. To Heather, our talented and dedicated Club Administration who tirelessly worked behind the scenes to organise, coordinate, and run our Surrey Park Swimming Short Course Meet – we thank you. The meet would not run and be the success it was without you.

Enjoy watching the highlights from the day!

Jul 26
0

Justin recieves Life Membership

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Surrey Park Swimming’s former Head Coach, Justin Bell, receives Life Membership for his outstanding contribution to our club over many decades.

Justin has been a pillar of Surrey Park for many years and was rightfully awarded Life Membership in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the club. His leadership, especially through the challenges of COVID, helped steer the club through one of its most uncertain times. The strong and stable position we are in today is a direct result of the energy, resilience and commitment Justin poured into our club. He will be greatly missed, and we thank him sincerely for everything he has done.

Jul 10
2

A New Era for Surrey Park Swimming Club

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We’re thrilled to announce the appointment of Janelle Pallister OLY as our new Head Coach, commencing after the World Championships in 2025. Janelle is one of Australia’s most respected swimming coaches, a former Olympian and a proven leader in high performance coaching. She has guided numerous swimmers to national and international success, including within the Australian Dolphins team and of course her daughter Lani.

Her arrival marks an exciting step forward in Surrey Park’s long-standing commitment to excellence – not only in elite performance, but in building an inclusive, values-driven, and community-first environment. With Janelle’s leadership, we look forward to taking our performance program to the next level while staying true to the club culture that’s supported swimmers and families for over 100 years.

With this exciting future for Surrey Park Swimming and the Victorian Swimming community, we are honoured to officially welcome Janelle to the Surrey Park family🏊‍♀️💙

Jun 09
0

July Intensive Holiday Program open for bookings

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July intensive swimming and diving programs are open for bookings at Surrey Park Swimming’s Blackburn and Aqualink Box Hill locations. Classes run every weekday morning these coming school holidays to fast track your child’s learning.

PROGRAM DETAILS:

Surrey Park Swimming Blackburn

  • 40 minute lessons
  • Classes running between 9:30am and 11:30am
  • Mineral salt water
  • Preschool to Teen classes
  • Learn to Swim
  • Specialist breaststroke kick classes
  • Private child lessons available

Surrey Park Swimming Aqualink Box Hill

  • 30 minute swim lessons
  • 45 minute diving lessons
  • Classes running between 9:00am and 1:00pm
  • Preschool to Teen classes
  • Learn to Swim
  • Learn to Dive
  • Specialist breaststroke and butterfly classes
  • Specialist breaststroke kick classes
  • Private child swim lessons

We have some scheduled upgrades planned for our Learn to Swim Victoria site, so the intensive school holiday program is still to be confirmed at our Heidelberg location.

 

To book into the program, fill in our form here

Jun 05
0

The benefits of winter swimming lessons

By | General, Learn to Swim and Dive | No Comments

Winter is coming! The swimming pool, swimming lessons. Really? No, that’s a summer thing. Now it’s time to hibernate: go home, turn on the heater, close the curtains, cook hearty meals, watch football on TV. That will see the family through to the warmer months. Kids can start swimming again then.

Sound familiar? Indeed, parents often pause kids’ swimming lessons over the winter months. But for the health, wellbeing and ongoing safety, is this the best approach? There are a number of reasons suggesting it’s not.

Water safety in summer starts in winter!

Safety is the most important reason parents enrol their kids in learn to swim programs but sadly Royal Life Saving Australia reports that the number of fatal drownings increased last year with the summer of 2024-25 one of the most deadly on record. The beach, pool, and inland waterways are a huge part of the activities enjoyed by kids and families in summer but many, simply, are not prepared, either in terms of safety knowledge or swimming skill.

The minimum level of swimming skill recommended for a Grade 6 student is to be able to confidently swim 50m of freestyle and tread water for 2 minutes. This is a minimum level and does not guarantee safety in an uncontrolled water environment. 48% of Australian Grade 6 children don’t even meet this standard (1).

As a water safety initiative, Royal Life Saving Australia is encouraging parents to enrol their children in swimming lessons during winter to prepare for summer.

Additionally, Royal Life Saving Australia notes that accidents happen in water all year round with 34% of drownings occurring in the autumn and winter seasons.  This reinforces the importance of children understanding how to handle emergencies and stay confident in the water during every season of the year.

It’s in the maths

Aisha and Billy are in Grade 2 and have basic water skills, putting their head under water and more-or-less floating on their back with some confidence. Aisha swims all year round and it takes her two years to progress from basic skills to confidently swimming 50m of freestyle. Billie, however, does not swim during the winter months. In his time away from lessons, Billie regresses: kids forget skills and muscle memory has not been established. Things need to be relearnt when he restarts lessons. Other kids with regular lessons are progressing faster. Billie loses some confidence and motivation: it’s harder and harder to get him to lessons. What might have been two years to achieve a minimum level of competence now starts to look more like four, if Billie is to continue at all. Billie faces the increasingly real possibility that he may end up one of 48% of Grade 6 students that doesn’t meet the minimum swimming safety level.

Aisha, meanwhile, is very much looking forward to school swimming sports.

Scrutinising the maths

Swimming competence – and confidence – takes time and commitment. How long will vary from kid to kid but one thing is for sure, it is a skill learnt in years not months. Pamela, a Surrey Park Swimming lead instructor, says, “Children’s skills regress if they take time off. Even during the two week school holidays they’ll come back and it takes them a few weeks to get their skills back to where they were towards the end of the term.” Taking six months off over winter can set skills back significantly, with each of the following a valid consideration:

  • Repetition is fundamental for long-term skill retention in children. Repetition and practice are key.
  • In younger swimmers, muscle memory, a key to developing as a swimmer, has not had the opportunity to ‘fix in’ making swimming technique more automatic.
  • Kids, quite simply, forget stuff. This relates to instruction given by the swim teacher and also to what may be crucial water safety information.
  • By continuing to swim through winter, kids have the opportunity to continue to develop and build on the skills and safety understanding that they had been working on previously.

Immunity and fitness

Swimming all year round helps kids stay active, fit, and healthy with benefits to both general physical and mental health. La Trobe University research indicates children who engage in swimming year-round tend to have stronger immune systems and are less susceptible to illness(2). This is very much contrary to the old myth that children will get sick swimming during the colder months, an idea directly addressed, and dispelled, by research (3).

Consistent swimming makes you smarter

The world’s most comprehensive study into the impact of early years swimming, conducted by Griffith University and involving 10,000 children (4), concluded that children in swimming schools appear to be more advanced in terms of their development. Lead researcher Professor Robyn Jorgensen noted, “While we expected the children to show better physical development and perhaps be more confident through swimming, the results in literacy and numeracy really shocked us. The children were anywhere from six to 15 months ahead of the normal population when it came to cognitive skills, problem solving in mathematics, counting, language and following instructions” (4).

And the logistics?

Rolling swimming lessons through from the warmer months straight on into the winter months helps provide kids with consistency of teachers, consistent routine and regular time slots, and allows kids the opportunity to start building swimming friendships with fellow classmates.

A couple of winter tips

The pool environments at Surrey Park Swimming Learn to Swim facilities are warm throughout the year. However, for the walk to, or from, the car, we strongly recommend making sure kids are dressed warmly (not in a wet towel) before and after lessons, with proper footwear and potentially a beanie, keeping feet and head warm. And while all our pools at Surrey Park Swimming are heated, if there is time, a hot shower afterwards will always warm kids up quickly.

 

References

  1. https://www.royallifesaving.com.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0017/32192/RLS_SwimWaterSafety_NatBenchmarks-Assessment.pdf
  2. https://www.latrobe.edu.au/news/announcements/2024/five-reasons-to-keep-your-kids-swimming-during-winter
  3. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277925217_Swimming_through_winter_necessary_for_children’s_health_and_development_expert_commentary
  4. https://news.griffith.edu.au/2013/08/13/swimming-a-smart-move-for-children/
May 12
1

Drowning rates on the rise – Why swimming lessons are important for our migrant communities?

By | Club Squad Swimming, General, Learn to Swim and Dive | No Comments

“I feel it’s because Australia is an island. We’re so blessed here,” says Houra Lavassani from the Migrant Information Centre. “The beach, going to a river or a lake. It’s a fun thing to do, a lifestyle. It’s a part of Australian culture.”

For many of Australia’s migrant population, however, a swimming culture may be a culture that is quite unfamiliar.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics most recent population data indicates that 30.7% (more than 8 million) of Australia’s population was born outside the country (1). Their nations of birth may have been land locked, swimming lessons and swimming pools may have been inaccessible or accessible only to the wealthy, and swimming skills and water safety may not have been considered institutional or parental priorities.

“For many, the beach or the pool wasn’t part of daily life the way it is here,” says Nesma Said, originally from Egypt and the mother of two Surrey Park Swimming squad members. She continues, “From what I’ve seen in the Egyptian community and among other Muslim or multicultural families, swimming ability can be quite limited, especially for the parents. In Egypt, unless families were middle to upper class and living near coastal areas or having access to social and sport clubs, swimming wasn’t necessarily a priority or widely taught in schools.”

Confirming Nesma’s observation, research conducted for the Australian Water Safety Strategy 2030 classifies 41% of overseas-born Australian residents as poor swimmers (2). This, tragically, translates into migrant communities being disproportionately represented in fatal drowning statistics, with the Water Safety Strategy identifying multicultural communities as a key area upon which to focus in order to reduce national drowning numbers. The Strategy notes that the primary risk factors in multicultural communities are 1: a lack of swimming ability, water safety knowledge and experience and 2: low levels of awareness and perception of risk.

After the drowning of two Nepali men in 2024, Mr Anil Pokhrel from the Non-Resident Nepali Association, speaking to the Guardian newspaper, said, “A lot of people who come here, they are not aware of ocean culture, they don’t understand the dangers, they don’t know about reefs, tides or waves” (3).

In this context, Nesma observes that in Australia, swimming is much more than just a sport. “It is a critical safety skill,” she says, “With beaches, rivers, and pools being such a big part of life here, not knowing how to swim puts people at real risk.”

This risk to migrant families is at its highest in their first years in Australia. Ms Stacey Pidgeon, manager of research and policy at Royal Life Saving, Australia noted on the ABC,  “Some of our research has shown, particularly for adults, it (learning to swim) is not a priority … particularly in those first five years when employment and education and finding a house are the priority” (4).

Nonetheless, understandably when the heat of summer sets in, migrant populations join the broader Australian population flocking to beaches, pools, lakes, and rivers. Learning swimming skills is crucial to enjoying these often remarkably beautiful water environments safely.

But learning to swim is not solely about safety. Selena (originally from India), Joy (from China), and Sarah (from Korea) have all been participants in Surrey Park Swimming’s Adult Learn to Swim Program for about a year. For Selena, it used to upset her that she did not have the confidence to join her children in the swimming pool when they would call out to her to come and play with them. Similarly, Joy was very scared of waves at the beach and would not go in with her family. Learning to swim has allowed them to engage with their children in summer water pursuits. And Sarah, whose daughter is a Surrey Park squad swimmer, takes pride in sharing swimming lesson stories with her family at the dinner table.

Pride, a sense of achievement, and overcoming fears are fundamental to the stories of each of these adult, migrant, learn to swim students. Selena sees this as something that can inspire her own children. She says, “I want to encourage my children to say, ‘Oh, see, Mum is scared of water but she is still learning swimming. She didn’t give up.’ It’s like I don’t want them to give up on things in their own lives.”

Houra from the Migrant Information Centre emphasizes further benefits for migrants to Australia. “It is a really, really good thing,” she says, “Not just because they learn a new skill, but because they make new connections with their community, make friendships in the community and also integration in the Australian community.” Nesma agrees, “Beyond safety, swimming is also a great way for families to integrate, connect socially, and feel included in Australian culture. It’s also something that promotes health and confidence, especially for young people.”

Good health, confidence, learning new skills, meeting people, facilitating integration, each and every one of these is so important in transitioning into a new environment, a new country and a new culture. And these, of course, are benefits of learning to swim in addition to the obvious: safety in the water for yourself and your family on those hot summer days.

Surrey Park Swimming has a comprehensive learn to swim program for adults. In addition to this, a portion of lesson fees from our Learn to Swim Programs go towards our Community Access Program for Swimming that provides free or subsidised lessons to refugee communities in our local area. These classes teach swimming skills and water safety. Surrey Park Swimming respects and understands the cultural and linguistic barriers that learning to swim may present to multicultural participants.

 

References:

  1. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/australias-population-country-birth/latest-release
  2. https://www.watersafety.com.au/australian-water-safety-strategy/
  3. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/jun/15/life-saving-lessons-multicultural-leaders-urge-education-in-second-language-of-water-safety-after-latest-drownings
  4. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-20/migrant-swim-safety-lessons-drowning-prevention/104234018