Richmond Hill – Schools and Top Up Swimming Success!

Richmond Hill is a special school for children with severe and complex needs. The total number in the school currently is 71 and the ages range from 5 to 11 years.

The support the school and its staff give to swimming is tremendous. Each child will have access to at least 2 terms or more of swimming across key stages 1 & 2, this includes 3 or more staff working in the water with the children giving one to one support where required. The total number of swimming sessions run across a typical week is 6.  Richmond Hill excels in their commitment for their children to learn to swim.  This is despite the usual barriers each school faces including the demand of curriculum time and transport costs.

As a result they enrolled onto the Top Up Swimming programme delivered by Active Luton in July 2006, providing the children with even more support to continue with their swimming progression.  A total of 5 Year 6 pupils, each with their own learning difficulties to overcome were successful in achieving progression towards the national curriculum standard, 3 pupils achieved the minimum standard of 25m, with the remaining 2 children gaining confidence and distance of up to 10m. A great achievement!

Richmond Hill have already expressed their interest to participate in Phase 2 of the Top Up swimming programme within Active Luton to be rolled out in the same format due to its great success.

The Top Up sessions ran over a 3-week period on 3 consecutive days for one hour duration. The pupils had access to 9 sessions in total.