How PE Leads are achieving swimming progress within a half term
If you lead swimming provision, there’s a quiet frustration you don’t often say out loud.
You plan carefully. You organise transport. You manage staffing ratios. You protect budget lines.
And yet, when you look at outcomes, progress often feels slow, fragmented, and hard to defend.
That’s not because you’re doing anything wrong.
It’s because the structure you’re working within limits what progress is possible.
Effort isn’t the issue. Evidence is.
Swimming provision isn’t judged by intent. It’s judged by outcomes.
As a PE Lead, you’re expected to be able to show:
Weekly off-site lessons make this difficult.
Time in the water is limited. Gaps between sessions are long. Progress varies widely between pupils. By the time you’re asked to evidence impact, the data often feels thin.
This is where some PE Leads are drawing a hard conclusion:
Our current model cannot deliver the level of progress we’re being asked to prove.
What changes when progress becomes the priority
Schools achieving accelerated progress haven’t raised expectations or increased pressure on staff.
They’ve changed one structural variable: how swimming time is organised.
Instead of spreading lessons thinly across weeks or terms, they deliver swimming on site as a short, intensive programme within the school day.
That single change alters the learning conditions.
Case study: Chilwell Croft Academy - progress you can evidence
At Chilwell Croft Academy in Birmingham, local pool closures and transport costs had made regular swimming provision increasingly unworkable.
After one half term of on-site delivery:
For the PE Lead, the significance wasn’t just the numbers.
Progress was:
This is the kind of evidence that stands up in conversations with SLT and governors.
Case study: Charville Academy - cohort-wide improvement, reduced burden
Charville Academy in Hayes had previously relied on off-site provision, which involved high transport costs and extensive planning, with limited impact on attainment.
After seven weeks of on-site swimming:
Crucially, staff reported less planning and administrative workload than with previous providers.
For PE Leads, this combination matters: stronger outcomes with less operational drag.
When progress reframes the question
Mill Lodge Primary School in Solihull provides one of the clearest comparisons.
Staff reported that Year 5 pupils made more progress in two weeks of on-site swimming than they had in two terms of weekly off-site lessons.
Measured outcomes included:
At this point, the question changes.
It’s no longer:
“Are we delivering swimming?”
It becomes:
“Why are we accepting a model that delivers so much less?”
Why accelerated progress happens
When swimming is delivered on site as a concentrated programme, PE Leads see consistent advantages:
Progress accelerates not because pupils are pushed harder, but because the conditions for learning improve.
Progress you can defend
Accelerated progress only matters if it can be demonstrated.
Schools delivering on-site swimming use structured assessments aligned with national curriculum expectations, tracking:
For PE Leads, this provides:
Evidence replaces explanation.
A decision PE Leads are now facing
If you are responsible for swimming provision, the decision is becoming harder to avoid:
Does our current model allow pupils to make rapid, measurable progress and does it allow me to prove it?
Schools achieving half-term progress have answered that question by changing structure, not expectations.
Test this approach in practice
If you want to check whether on-site swimming could deliver this level of progress in your school, you can:
Join a Discovery Webinar (5 March or 22 April) to examine safeguarding, staffing, timetabling, and assessment in detail.
Download the Swim:ED Impact Report for full cohort-level data and case studies
Both options are designed to support informed, defensible decision-making, without obligation.