When/how are they testing swimming ability? The article makes it sound like some sort of national standardised test, but I don't recall ever being tested on this stuff in school.

In fact, school really didn't play much of a part at all in my learning to swim. We never had "swim carnivals" until high school, and even then I was only required to attend and compete once.

Most of my swimming ability comes from private lessons at local pools and VACSWIM in the summer holidays, as well as lots of recreational swimming from growing up by the beach. Makes me wonder whether part of the problem here is that young families have been priced out of many coastal suburbs and are now moving further inland to find cheaper housing, increasing their reliance on school swimming lessons and private swim centres.

[–] Dimand@aussie.zone 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

They threw us in the deep end with trackpants and a jumper on and we had to tread water for 5 minutes back when I was like 12. Then we had to take off the heavy clothes in the water and do 50 m. I feel like one of the teachers had a clipboard marking us off, but at least at my school it was expected that every kid could manage that.

[–] Ilandar@lemmy.today 2 points 2 days ago

Meanwhile my main memory is doing the macarena in the pool with floaties lol

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

We never had “swim carnivals”

Huh. I was overseas for the end of primary school and all of high school, but I do remember having swim carnivals when I was here in primary school. My school had its own 25 m pool, and so, from what I've seen, do a lot of schools in Brisbane's middle and outer suburbs (I checked 7 near me and 6 did).

[–] Ilandar@lemmy.today 2 points 2 days ago

I wonder if my experience is unusual in Adelaide too. I'm not aware of many public primary schools that had their own swimming pools here back then. My primary school still doesn't have one despite being much larger now, probably because it's only a couple of hundred metres back from the beach. Their swimming "curriculum" still seems to be entirely comprised of annual lessons at the same swimming pool they sent us to when I was there.

[–] thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 days ago

Good question, actually!

I was educated through Catholic institutions in inner-Melbourne, and vividly remember taking swim classes in primary school. I’m sure they handed out some form of certificate of completion, but those would have probably been just a Xerox copy and nothing accredited or formal.

Similar to you, most of my ability to swim came from summers at the local public pool or beaches.

We also had the same competitive swim carnivals in high-school; and it was just taken at face value that every student could swim (and they could).

We also had some swim-focused PE classes if I remember correctly, but I could also be confusing them with swim club as it was so long ago.

Long story short, I don’t actually know how they actually track this metric either - but it does seem a bit wishy-washy, ‘ey?