At Saltford we are lucky to have a swimming pool on site, enabling all our children to swim once a week from April to October. Our pool was built in response to the tragic drowning of a Saltford child at The Shallows more than fifty years ago. Since then countless children from our community have learned to swim here and there is no doubt that this has saved many lives over the years.

Volunteer helpers

Volunteers are essential to support this activity and we would be very grateful for your help.  All volunteers will be required to hold a school DBS certificate which will have to be organised prior to volunteering.  A number of forms will need to be completed and identity verified to support this process.  Once approved, the DBS certificate will be sent to your home and will need to be shown to the school office to complete our records.  Please contact the school office if you wish to apply for a volunteer DBS.  

If you are signed up to help, or are wondering what is involved with regard to safety, please read the current guidelines for swimming helpers here. 

An electronic sign-up sheet for each class, showing the number of helpers required and how many spaces are available can be accessed via a volunteer sign up website https://volunteersignup.org which our PTA has used previously for school events.  When you offer to help you will be asked for your first and last name, email address and phone number. You cannot proceed without this.  The website’s privacy notice is available here volunteersignup.org/legal/privacy 

Timetable of classes

To check your child’s swimming day, please see the relevant class page here or, for detailed information of the dates of each session by class, see the timetable with dates here.

Financing the pool

We try hard to keep this tremendous asset open for the current and for future generations.

The maintenance and running costs of the pool are high and sometimes unpredictable, and with the current educational funding crisis we have had to look seriously at how the costs can be met.

In evaluating all available options, the school researched the possibility of taking our children to a local leisure centre for swimming. This was not judged to be a viable option because it would mean:

• a significant increase in time spent away from the classroom, losing curriculum time. To take one year group to the local pool where each class (30 pupils) would swim for 30 minutes would take two hours minimum.
• we would only be able to offer swimming to one year group (60 pupils) per term, rather than to all 430 pupils.
• we would need significantly more helpers to accompany the children to meet the required ratio for coach trips. For a KS2 year group of 60 children, we would require at least 8 adult helpers, whereas if one KS2 class swims at school we only need 1 adult helper per class.

To cover the overall running costs and future maintenance, the potential for an outside contractor to take over the running of the pool was also considered.

If we are to keep all children at Saltford School swimming we have decided respectfully to ask parents for a £3.00 per lesson per child towards the repairs, running costs and provision of lessons.

However, we would be very grateful for any donation, more or less than the suggested payment, from anyone who feels that they could support this facility.