OPERATOR PERSPECTIVE
OPERATOR PERSPECTIVE
The main area that’s being squeezed is family swimming. Families are still coming to our centres, but to enjoy other aspects of our offering.
We’re also seeing good levels of interest in our off-peak adult quiet swims, which are designed to be inclusive and welcoming for neurodiverse individuals as well as those with dementia and other long-term health conditions. Piloted a couple of years ago, we’ve gone from zero to reach 59,000 attendances in the 12 months to 31 March 2025. Off the back of this success, we’ve also launched quiet family swims, for families with children with autism, for example, who might be overwhelmed by the usual hustle and bustle of a leisure centre. Of course, all of this also helps maximise off-peak, daytime use of our pools. We’re also rolling out our Good Boost partnership: we now deliver its pool-based MSK programme across 46 of our venues, serving around 500 people every week. Some are self-referred, while others come to us through GP or hospital referrals.
And we continue our work with Level Water, partnering to deliver swimming to more than 300 children and young people with physical disabilities every week. Following a successful trial, we now have Hydrohex – virtual aqua fitness classes on a huge poolside screen – at seven centres and will roll out more this year. It’s great because you see the virtual instructor not only above but also below the water line, so you can see exactly what they’re doing. In the 12 months to 31 March 2025, we delivered 577 school sessions to 18,262 pupils on the topic of water safety. And interestingly, we have more diving pools in our estate than ever before: eight centres with diving pools and around 2,000 people diving. Among these, the London Aquatics Centre and Ponds Forge are both high performance centres, meaning we have a full pathway from learn-to-dive right through to Olympic athlete. It’s generating a lot of interest.
In 2021, swimming was the main activity for 44 per cent of Moving Communities respondents. This had dropped to 34 per cent by 2024.
Any other innovations to grow participation? We’re forever seeking out new ways to make what we do smarter, neater, better and more appealing to our customers – but crucially, we shape our programmes around each local community, scaling up or down to meet their specific needs, whether that’s more family swims, women and girls sessions, sessions for people living with a long-term health condition and so on. We know we have to be agile and flexible in embracing what the market in front of us is asking for. For example, we’ve realised there’s whole tranche of young people aged 16 to 18 who didn’t have lessons when they were children and who then missed out on school swimming during the pandemic, followed by a few years of body consciousness during puberty when they didn’t want to swim – so they’ve never learnt. Previously they might have joined adult lessons. Now we’re offering dedicated lessons for them.
Meanwhile, to continually enhance the quality of our learn-to-swim offering, we now have an internal National Training Manager. She’s also a tutor with Swim England and has delivered internal training and upskilling for 1,800 of our teachers over the last 12 months – everything from best practice class management to how to deliver adult- and-child sessions in a more fun, friendly, engaging way. It was a big decision to recruit and pay a full-time tutor, but there’s lots of competition out there. We’re determined that our swim lessons are as engaging as possible, delivered by capable, confident, qualified teachers. Additionally, through our partnership with Swim England, we’ve supported 2,100 of our teachers with external training, helping them upskill and/or maintain their qualifications. Still in the swim lesson space, we’ve launched a portal – Sport Passport – and are seeing increasingly high levels
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STATE OF THE UK FITNESS INDUSTRY REPORT 2023 STATE OF THE UK SWIMMING INDUSTRY REPORT 2025
STATE OF THE UK FITNESS INDUSTRY REPORT 2023
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STATE OF THE UK SWIMMING INDUSTRY REPORT 2025
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