Swim England are bringing in new guidelines for its affiliated clubs in a bid to show they have the highest standards of safe and effective practice in place.

The Stronger Affiliation process is being introduced so new and existing members know clubs are well run and their personnel have the necessary safeguarding checks in place to ensure members’ safety. Other sports, including football and tennis, have also introduced similar schemes.

Swim England has a total of 1,045 affiliated clubs and more than half of these (55 per cent) are SwimMark accredited – the national governing body’s quality standard for clubs. Those that do not currently hold SwimMark will now have to provide six pieces of evidence to ensure they stay affiliated to Swim England from January 2021.

The focus areas will be around club constitution, risk assessments, club personnel records, safeguarding certificates plus compliance statements from the club’s chairperson and welfare officer.

Clubs can then submit additional evidence if they wish to become fully SwimMark accredited. All clubs that are currently SwimMark accredited will not have to complete these new guidelines as they will have already done so as part of the SwimMark process. However, they will need to ensure they maintain their accredited status.

More information on this can be found on the Swim England website.