Ayrshire swimmers set to learn vital water safety skills as part of Drowning Prevention Week
Swimming pools across the country are adapting their lessons into workshops on water safety
Over 2000 youngsters in North Ayrshire are set to learn vital water safety skills as part of Drowning Prevention Week.
Learn to Swim lessons at KA Leisure facilities are teaching children how to be safer in and around water during June as part of a Scotland-wide campaign.
Swimming pools across the country are adapting and transforming their regular swimming lessons into workshops which will focus specifically on water safety knowledge and skills.
Swimmers will learn the crucial Water Safety Code as well as basic floating techniques which can make a massive difference when someone feels in danger in the water and that could help save their lives or someone else's.
The special lessons come as latest figures reveal the ongoing risks around Scotland's waters with the National Water Safety Forum reporting that tragically in 2024 there were 33 accidental drownings in Scotland.
Drowning prevention is one of the main objectives for the Learn to Swim National Framework and in June each year the programme does a major water safety push to coincide with Drowning Prevention Week, where youngsters take part in a bespoke water safety swim lesson delivered by the leisure trusts and aquatic providers.
John Lunn, CEO of Scottish Swimming, said: 'Every June, our Learn to Swim classes shift focus to concentrate on water safety.
'It's not just about being a strong swimmer- understanding how to recognise hazards, help others in distress and make smart decisions around water is equally important.'
Peter Farrer, Chief Operating Officer at Scottish Water, added: ''We cannot over-emphasise the importance of water safety all year round, but it's particularly relevant as we approach summer when people are often more likely to be around water.
'These water safety lessons provide an opportunity to equip people with the vital knowledge and skills to help them feel safer in, on and around water, and help their parents and family network feel confident and comfortable in their swimming abilities.'
Drowning Prevention Week, organised by the Royal Life Saving Society (RLSS), stands as one of the largest water safety campaigns in the UK and Ireland.
here.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
BBC News
4 hours ago
- BBC News
Double demolition as Glasgow tower blocks to be blown down
Two well-known Glasgow tower blocks are to be blown down in a planned demolition on 305 and 341 Caledonia Road in the Gorbals will be brought down to make way for new New Gorbals Housing Association (NGHA) will replace the high-rise flats with more than 100 new social rent homes. It is understood the explosion will take place on Sunday afternoon with a large exclusion zone set up including the nearby Southern Necropolis cemetery and the Gorbals Rose Garden. The Caledonia Road flats were constructed in the 1960s as an answer to slum housing, overcrowding and struggled after World War Two and the Gorbals area became known as one of Europe's worst 40,000 people lived in deteriorating tenement the time the 1960s arrived, high rise flats were one solution to clear the accommodation and build new concrete blocks were often criticized for being poorly designed, damp, and failing to improve community life, although many local people spent happy lives in these flats before they started being rehoused in 2021. Many were eventually demolished in controlled explosions as part of ongoing regeneration spectacle of collapsing Gorbals tower blocks has attracted attention over the years. Towers in Sandiefield Road came down in 2013, with Norfolk Court's flats taken down in Stirlingfauld Place towers were blown down in large Queen Elizabeth Square towers came down in September 1993, ending in Helen Tinney died after being struck by debris as she watched the demolition. The future of the two Caledonia Road had been sealed by the costs involved in bringing dangerous cladding up to acceptable safety these two blocks come down, just one tower will remain, the neighbouring Waddell controlled blow down will be managed by contractors company has been liaising with other local residents on the arrangements for the demolition. About 850 households will be evacuated from the surrounding area before it can go exclusion zone will allow people to observe from a safe distance and people have been warned to expect a loud and dusty has been preparing the towers for several months - stripping the buildings and making sure viable materials can be said that it had worked with the housing association to save tonnes of material from going to landfill.
BBC News
12 hours ago
- BBC News
The artist who swept Glasgow's streets for 30 years
When Allan Richardson was 17 he wanted to go to art school, but one day he returned home from school to find his dad had secured him an interview for a job with the council."All I wanted to do was my art," said Allan. "But my dad said to me, 'you can do your art but you have to have something to keep you'."Allan went to the interview and the following Monday he started work as a "litter boy", going round the streets and emptying the took a back seat over the next decade as he worked in various council jobs before settling on sweeping the streets of Glasgow's west end. For 30 years, until his recent retirement, Allan kept the city's Byres Road and its surrounding streets clean but he also made sure he had his paint palette and sketchbook in his pocket. Drawing and painting almost every day during his lunch break, and often with his handmade sketchbook balanced on the bar of his cart, Allan quickly became accustomed to searching for the west end's hidden gems."People walk by going to work or university, or they're on a phone and they're just walking ahead thinking about where they need to be, but there is so much all around them."That was the good thing about my job, I would see all of that and think 'that's an interesting feature on that building, I might come back and draw that'." Allan, who is now 60, said the area had changed a lot over the three decades he cleaned and painted said Byres Road has always been a centre for students, but the butchers and jewellery stores of the past have now been swapped for chain takeaways and coffee a plan in his head as he swept the streets, Allan has painted hundreds of buildings in the west end from the cobbled backstreets and popular student hangouts to the Kibble Palace in the Botanic Gardens and the iconic tower of Glasgow University's Gilbert Scott Building."There's a lot of good architecture in the west end and there's a lot of history, which I really like," he said. Part of Glasgow west end's story Allan said one of the reasons he stayed in his job so long was the people he met and spoke to each day."For some of the older people in the area, chatting to me would make their day as they maybe wouldn't speak to anyone for a couple of days," he of the people Allan spoke to and became a close friend of was renowned Scottish writer and artist Alasdair Gray."I used to sweep his street," said said he had no idea who Gray was but the paintbrushes in his window had caught his attention as he passed by, so the next time Allan saw him, he asked if he was an artist."He invited me in to have a look around at his work but he never introduced himself," Allan said."It wasn't until later I discovered who he was, and I would chat to him like with any of the other locals."One day Gray asked Allan if he could draw him."I went to his flat and he sketched me," he said."A few years later, I discovered I was going to be on the new mural at Hillhead subway station after its refurbishment, which was fantastic."I can now go to the underground and see myself standing there with my brush as part of the story of the west end." Gray, who is best-known for his first novel Lanark, died in 2019. His Hillhead subway mural shows a panoramic and detailed sweep of the west end, from Byres Road looking east towards the centre of shows many of the streets Allan swept and drew for 30 years. Now retired, Allan said it's time to move on and learn something new as he hopes to do more art classes and explore new places in the city with his Glasgow Urban Sketchers group.
BBC News
2 days ago
- BBC News
Whaling Archive: 'I left Shetland to hunt whales in the Antarctic'
Gibbie Fraser was a teenager when he decided the best way to afford a motorbike like his friends on the west side of Shetland was to join the crew of a whaling later, at the age of 16, he was battling rough seas and violent storms in relentless pursuit of the largest animals on earth, 8,000 miles (13,000 km) from home in the South Atlantic is one of several former Scottish whalers contributing to a new digital time capsule exploring the country's forgotten history in modern Whalers' Memory Bank, launched in Dundee, aims to capture a snapshot of life onboard the whale-catching vessels around South Georgia and Antarctica between 1904 and 1965. "It was the highlight of my life," said Gibbie, who is chairman of the Shetland ex-Whalers Association."I knew boys who had gone before and they came home the following summer with really nice motorcycles and I thought 'that's the way to do it'."It was an adventure and when you are young, it is like a bit of a drug." Now 83, he was among hundreds of Scots who joined boats along with largely Norwegian crew in the post-war years, when work was like him, had grown up in small, coastal communities on Shetland, while others came from the Leith, in Edinburgh-based firm, Christian Salvesen, operated whale processing ports at the aptly named Leith Harbour at Stromness Bay in South Georgia, a British overseas territory about 870 miles (1,400 km) from the Falkland would fire harpoons aimed at killing and capturing blue, fin and humpback whales, which were brought aboard and processed at a centre in the island's main settlement, Grytviken. Gibbie began his career cooking and serving meals for the crew and cleaning the boat as a mess boy in the late the only non-smoker, he would also be sent above deck to steer at night while shipmates stayed below to play cards for remembered the conditions on board being hard, but said there was a sense of "camaraderie" among the crew."The catchers were wonderful boats and came through a lot of heavy weather, but you never walked along the aft end along the main deck, you had to go via the lifeboat deck because the main deck was awash most of the time," he said."When you were in bed, you were not far from where the gun platform was. You were about a foot-and-a-half from where the sea was. You could hear it rushing by."And it was daylight right round the clock. If you were among whales, then you kept going, you never stopped. It was right around the clock until the whales had disappeared." On one occasion, he recalled pursuing a fin whale in straight line for four hours before it was eventually said he "felt sorry" for the whales that were caught, adding he never wanted to see them suffer."I realise that it was a warm-blooded animal that could feel pain like I could, and probably fear too," he said."You always hoped that when the harpoon went in, that would kill it, it was never nice to see it struggle for a while." 'No longer viable' Gibbie completed four seasons aboard the boats and was only prevented from returning for a fifth when he suffered an arm injury in a crash involving his motorbike and a school bus at home in industry began to crumble in the early-1960s against the backdrop of more stringent government regulation and early environmental campaigns against the killing of the by that point, whale stocks had become so low that the practice was "no longer deemed economically viable".The Edinburgh-based firm, Christian Salvesen, wound down its whaling operations in is estimated about 176,000 whales were slaughtered and processed in South Georgia between 1904 and 1965. Historian Dan Snow helped launch the memory bank aboard the RRS Discovery in boat was built in the city as a research vessel which ferried explorers Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton to the Antarctic in was centre of Scottish whaling throughout the 19th century when whale oil became an essential component for the softening of fabrics during jute says elements of the Discovery's construction were inspired by the whaling vessels arriving in the city during that period. He told BBC Radio's Good Morning Scotland: "Discovery was an Antarctic survey vessel built in Dundee because it had that whaling expertise, built with all sorts of features that they learned from whaling ships."It had things like rudders that lifted up into the hull and special strong hulls."Through the memory bank, we've been able to save these stories, these testimonies about what it was like to go down there for months on end through the eternal summer of the Antarctic and chase whales, using world war two ships and radar equipment, it was like they were waging war on these whales." The memory bank has been produced by the South Georgia Heritage Trust and the South Georgia worked with former whaling communities across Scotland to collect archive pictures and film, alongside several hundred items and oral histories and create a digital database, which can be viewed Balfour, assistant curator of the museum, whose great-grandfather and grandfather were both whalers in South Georgia, said: "To understand more about what they saw, what they experienced and how they, their colleagues and families back home must have felt, is incredibly special."It is amazing that over 60 years on from the whaling the camaraderie that exists between the whalers is just as strong."
