Worried about water safety? Heres how aquatic education can prevent drowning

Water safety and aquatic education should be mandatory for all kids across Bangladesh to mitigate drowning incidents and promote a more active life. According to UNICEF, drowning is one of the leading causes of death, and annually, 14,000 children drown across the country. Such tragedies could easily be prevented if every school made swimming programs mandatory for children. 

The International School Dhaka (ISD) has recently brought the AUSTSWIM program to offer students aged 11 to 16 water safety and aquatic education. AUSTSWIM is an Australian national organization for teaching swimming and water safety. Its license is industry-leading and widely recognized globally. 

As a country and an island, Australia takes swimming and water safety seriously because public access to nearly 12,000 beaches results in numerous possible aquatic safety challenges. Similarly, Bangladesh, being the land of rivers, also witnesses a high number of water-related encounters due to many unsupervised public access points. Thus, we should strengthen aquatic education here, like in Australia, to prevent future incidents. 

The swim program at ISD is a combination of two highly regarded learning frameworks: MYP (Middle Years Programme, which is one of the three International Baccalaureate programs followed by ISD) and AUSTSWIM. An AUSTSWIM coach, along with other certified swim coaches, will teach all the students. In the program, students learn stroke performance, water rescues, snorkelling, and self-management skills. It helps them to simulate real-life scenarios that they might encounter in their lives. While most of the learning occurs in the swimming pool, MYP students also follow the curriculum framework to foster the theoretical understanding of aquatics in reflection, planning, and knowledge-based activities. A combination of practical and theoretical deepens and broadens students' awareness of real-life aquatic situations. 

Survival swimming skills, including survival backstroke, sculling, and rescues, are taught and practised in the swimming pool. Later, it gets interpreted into real-life scenarios in written-based assessments where students get the opportunity to place themselves in the centre of challenging situations, motivating them to explore on a deeper level. In Bangladesh, children might encounter water-related incidents through rivers, ponds, and beach coastlines. In response to that, the school is motivating students to engage in safe learning environments that have been drawn from statistics and environment-based knowledge. The children are also taught to perform peer rescues in a beach environment to demonstrate aquatic expertise and skill, which will keep themselves and others safe. 

The swimming program has the power to make a difference in numerous people's lives, significantly when children will save someone from drowning, or they will pursue it as a career. Most importantly, swimming programs will save hundreds to thousands of lives and lower the drowning rate in Bangladesh. 

The school feels proud to bring such a program to Bangladesh and encourages other institutions to add swimming as part of the curriculum so that together, we all can protect the children and decrease the drowning rate of the nation. A change wont occur if only one institution addresses the water safety issue; all schools must do it, as drowning accidents are not a single institution issue but a national problem. Remember that every drowning incident can be prevented if adequate measures have been taken to mitigate it. 

According to the WHO Global Report on Drowning, there are ten actions that can prevent drowning, and one of them is teaching school kids swimming and water safety skills. Drowning poses major issues to children and youth, and schools across Bangladesh must include swimming programs in their curriculum to provide adequate knowledge and training to the children. Aquatic education has become vital for all, especially for the children in Bangladesh.