Over the last few months we have kept you as informed as much as we could about the challenges we face on resuming swimming lessons. With the pools being allowed to reopen from the 25th July, we have been looking into how this would affect us all at Eastbourne Otters and a possible restart date given the current and ongoing Covid 19 situation.

Guidance has been sent out from Swim England, the UK’s governing body, relating to swimming lessons, which we have read many times and here is our decision.

After taking time to thoroughly evaluate the guidance we have come to the conclusion that for the safety of all our swimmers, parents and teachers, Eastbourne Otters (as one of many other swim schools in the country) will remain closed until Monday 7th September. This is of course on the condition that the school pools are open and available for us to use at that time.

Other Pool Operators in the industry, such as Freedom Leisure and The Sovereign Centre are opening their pools but are also not operating swimming lessons until September.

The main hurdles we need to overcome are: 

Being able to maintain social distancing, sanitizing equipment and the pool environment.

Social distancing must be followed by us all. As such only limited numbers of swimmers would be allowed in the pool at any one time and unfortunately no parents will be allowed in buildings so we will operate a drop off swim ready/pick up service. No changing facilites will be available at this time.

I'm sure you will agree this is not an ideal situation for any of us but we feel that a return in whatever form is better than not returning at all.

Under the current Swim England guidelines, it is recommended that teachers are not in the pool with the children but this is up to  individual providers to manage the risk. As a result of the survey we carried out, we have decided, based on your feedback, a member of Otters staff will be in the pool in each lesson, socially distanced from the swimmers.

We will have reduced numbers in the classes to keep everyone safe. We will try to accomodate everyone as best we can but it may not be possible to get everyone back in the pool straight away.

We will be temperature checking all staff and swimmers at the entrance to the building and anyone with a raised temperature will not be able to enter.

We will operate a track and trace system which will be carried out using our registers and if any swimmer or teacher tests positive for Covid 19 we will pass your details to the track and trace team.

We will of course keep you all up to date if any of the above changes.

Until that time, I hope you enjoy the summer holidays. Stay safe and we look forward to getting back to normality as soon as we can for you all.

Best wishes, 

Claire and Team Otters