An interview study with primary school teachers about how swimming education is conducted.

The aim of this study has been to investigate how swimming-education is conducted in schools and if the PE-teachers feel that their knowledge about swimming is enough.Where and by whom is the swimming conducted? What role does the PE-teacher have during the swim practice? How does the teacher think their knowledge in swimming is compared to the criteria of swimming in the school? The method has been a qualitative interview-study, with teacher working in the years 4-6 in schools in Sweden. I made six semi-structured interviews that took between 15-25 minutes each to complete. The results showed that swimming is outsourced in all schools. Instead of being conducted by PE teachers it is conducted by staff working at the pools. One teacher was present at every swim practice and the other five teachers only joined at the swim-test. All teachers thought it was good that someone else took care of the swimming lessons, someone with knowledge and expertise. One teacher was worried about the planning of the lessons and that it felt like the teachers made it up as the lesson went. All planning was made by the staff at the pools, and by the end of year three in school they gave the PE-teacher a document that told them which students that could swim. That document decided if the children had to have extra-teaching in swimming or if they could wait and take the test in year six again. All PE-teachers said that they needed extra education in case they were to conduct the swim practise by themselves, and all teachers wanted more content knowledge in swimming. Five of the teachers said that they could go a course in swimming to increase their content knowledge. One problem noticed in earlier research and by our education minister (Ekström, 2021) is the time allocated for swimming. Time was noticed as a problem in the swim-practise in 1969 (LPO69b) and for me it is a mystery how nothing is happening. Another interesting finding is that when the swim-test is conducted the teachers look at different things. All teachers said that it was the 200 meter that was important and that is to be done to get a grade. Two teachers said that the technique in swimming did not matter, that if the students made it through the 200 meters it was enough. Two teachers said that they also could see other criteria in the curriculum and mentioned how the student’s movement was adjusted to different surroundings. With this study I want to give a picture of how swimming is conducted at six schools in Sweden. Some of the teachers I interviewed said that they had talked to other colleagues and that they were interested to be in this study as well. I did not have time to include more teachers, but if someone wants to extend research in this area there are a good possibility to get teachers to join since they are willing to help for my small, but important work