GOLD ACCREDITATION SKILL DEVELOPMENT

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Bath Dolphin Swimming Clubs road to Swim 21 Skill Development Gold accreditation started in April 2002 with the appointment of the Club's Swim 21 Co ordinator and an audit sub committee.

The audit completed, with numbers cross referenced and double checked was sent to the Sport England representative (the West was between RDO's at this time).

The comments and suggestions resulting from the audit came back and now was the time to produce the action plan.

Bath Dolphin S.C has been producing and implementing action plans for many years so this did not cause too many problems we included the usual items with the additions that came form the shortfalls identified by the audit.

The audit is set in a way that a club can immediately see what they need to bring into the plan.

The action plan was submitted and the go ahead was given to start implementing the plan.

The club then had to decide which of the four levels it was going to go for, again, this was not a difficult decision. Following the audit results and the pool hours available it was decided to go for the Skill Development level.

Bath & North East Somerset Sports Development already have their own Club Accreditation Scheme based on Club, Management and Coaching Structures and Bath Dolphin S.C has already achieved silver accreditation on this scheme so much of documentation requirements for Swim 21 had already been in place within the Club for a number of years.

Bath Dolphin will also be applying for Teaching Club level but, to save the sanity of their Swim 21 Co- ordinator decided to concentrate on one level at a time.

This decided, the next item on the agenda was to call a meeting of the members of the Management Committee, all of the Teachers , Coaches and the swimmer representatives ( the Club Captains).

A presentation by the Swim 21 Co-ordinator was given, setting out the aims, objectives and requirements of Swim 21, the aims, objectives and requirements of the Club and the implementation of the action plan and it's implications.

The co-operation of everyone involved in the Club was stressed; Swim 21 accreditation cannot be achieved without the FULL co operation of everyone involved in the club.

Working closely with our partners in B&NES Sports Development, Active Sports and the West RDO enabled the club to implement certain elements of the action plan quite easily. The majority of the Swim 21 requirements for Skill development were already in place.

BDSC have been using Job Descriptions, policy documents, etc for many years Teachers and Coaches had been meeting to share ideas as well as attending management and swimming committee meetings.

The Teachers and Coaches have always been willing to underpin and upgrade qualifications and are always willing to attend generic courses.

The paper documentation required for compilation of the evidence file is very daunting, however this is a very worthwhile exercise for any club (not just a swimming club) even if the club is not yet going for accreditation as once compiled the file holds details of the workings of the Management and the coaching systems as used by the current membership.

Bath Dolphin was surprised and delighted to achieve Gold accreditation on first submission; this shows how professional our coaches and committee are even though they are all volunteers. It also shows what can be achieved with the full co-operation of the coaches and their willingness to embrace fully Swim 21.

The assessment panels commended the Club on it's Volunteer Investment ( training and development) and Disability Links & Development.

Swim 21 is an ongoing process; we are now working on our 2003/04 action plan and are looking for ways to improve on what we have already accomplished.

We are already in the process of compiling our Teaching Club accreditation file.

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