Changes to ‘Friday Night’
Friday night serves two main purposes. First it gives Romiley children the opportunity to improve their swimming and survival skills through the attainment of ASA badges. Secondly, it gives young teenagers the opportunity to learn how to teach swimming. The ASA challenge and survival badges we use filled this role very well. They are not too complex to teach but follow a structured progression. This allowed us to have a simple test night every 6 months where testers are able to standardise performance.
The ASA are withdrawing most of these awards over the next few years leaving us only the new National Plan to follow.
This complex scheme, although better structured than the old National Plan, is designed to be taught by professionals and tested by continuous assessment which we cannot achieve.
We are having to phase in this scheme on a rolling programme and turn the skills required for each grade, into a single assessment to be done on ‘test night’. This is the only way we can think to ensure we stick to the high standards required of the scheme.
Children have already started to receive the NNP grade badges in the ‘beginners’ and ‘improvers’ classes
The old NP, which Pam has been offering, will be phased out. It bears little correlation with the NNP.
Whilst this changeover period takes place (over the next year/18 months) Children may receive badges from the old and new schemes. The parents may be confused but the children just like getting their badges so the more the merrier!
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