Water Safety Training gets underway!
Sian has long had a vision to provide good quality, useful water safety training to our community to provide everyone with the skills to keep them safe when dipping and swimming.
As with all ideas that happen at Bluetit HQ it got bounced around a while and the we came up with a plan.
We set about training our swim coach/life guards in water safety, so that they could pass this information on to our Bluetit community. What we soon realised was that there is often a lot of negativity around entering cold water and that just didn't feel very Bluetitty, we wanted to deliver a more positive message to encourage people to be able to access water safely and gain the benefits of cold water, so we took on the challenge and decided to write our own water safety course which reiterated these positive messages whilst also covering the aspects of water safety essential for our community.
We started to write our course in 2023, with funding from the National Lottery Wales and generous donations received from our Bluetit community through fundraising activities. We wanted the course to be really valuable so we decided to get it accredited. The process of completing the work to get the course accredited by the Institute of Outdoor Learning took longer than we had anticipated, and after months of hard work we got the accreditation and the course became ready for delivery in September 2024.
The National Lottery Wales funding enabled us to deliver the course to our Welsh volunteer admins and we held 2 training sessions in September and October 2024 one in South Wales and one in North Wales.
We had over 20 attendees from across areas of Wales, who completed training in Water Safety and Inclusivity with Makala (Water Development Director) and Jackie (Inclusivity volunteer). The training sessions were informative and interactive, being full of the usual Bluetit fun and community – and of course we went for a dip together too!
Our next plans are to role out this training further across the UK to our volunteer admins and wider community. There will be a course fee for our wider community but we hope to be able to secure further funding to train our volunteer admins across the UK. Unfortunately, although we applied we were not successful in securing funding from the National Lottery England and so we are currently working together looking for funding for this.
