During school swimming lessons, valuable lesson time can be lost with the job of allocating students into an appropriate level. Often the entire first lesson can be taken up with student assessments and re-arranging classes.
This process makes the first lesson chaotic and can waste an entire session of valuable learning time.
Now there is a better way to overcome this challenge.
The SwimDesk Schools program level questionnaire allows parents to fill in a simply survey to determine their child’s ideal starting level for school swimming lessons.
Parents can be sent an online link which allows them to answer some short questions about their childs swimming ability. The questionnaire is typically between 6 and 10 questions in length.
The level allocation questionnaire is based on a series of Yes/No questions.
When a question receives a NO answer, this determines the child’s recommended starting level.
The logic within SwimDesk school’s allows the child’s recommended starting level to appear next to the child’s record allowing you to quickly group and allocate students into the appropriate starting level.
It’s ideal to encourage parents to be conservative when judging their child’s ability as we have found that some parents tend to slightly over rate their child’s swimming ability.
By collecting this information, you are then able to best determine the ideal starting level for each student.
Here is an example of a level allocation questionnaire
| Has your child had lessons before? Is your child confident in the water? | Yes | No |
| Can they kick on their front & back with a kickboard? | Yes | No |
| Can your child do Freestyle & Backstroke with board? | Yes | No |
| Can your tread water for more than 1 minute? | Yes | No |
| Can your child do Survival breaststroke & Sidestroke? | Yes | No |
| Can your child do 100 IM (25m Free, 25m Back, 25m Breast, 25m Fly) | Yes | No |
Based on the answers to the questionnaire above, the child will be assigned a recommended starting level.
Naturally, parents are not correct 100% of the time and there will always be movement after the first lesson.
By using this method we have found that students are allocated into the correct level over 80% of the time which results in a much better and more organised first lesson with more time spent on teaching.
