PAN1326 Local Swimming Needs Insight

Swimming is the largest participation sport in England (with around 17 million people aged 14+ who swim at least once a year), but is in a period of steep decline. It is important to stem this decline because of swimming’s unique contribution to the physical activity landscape:

• 41% of weekly swimmers just swim and do no other sport (so if we ‘lose’ a swimmer, we’re likely to ‘lose’ a participant from activity overall)
• It’s the sport with largest female participation and demand (in an overall context of many more men taking part in sport than women)
• It is an accessible sport – it is an activity that can be low impact for those with injuries, disabilities and long term conditions - if disabled swimming was a sport in its own right it would be the 9th largest in England

Against this backdrop, Sport England is funding a series of pilot interventions to test different ways to increase swimming participation.

This request for quotation relates to local research needed for the Authority to apply for funding from Sport England for one of those pilot interventions.

The vision for the pilot is to apply the latest national research (please see attached The ASA behavioral insight on page 13) around improving the swimming experience to local swimming pools, for local audiences. The desired outcome of the pilot is to understand the impact of making several ‘small’ (i.e. not major facility refurbishments) improvements simultaneously to the swimming customer experience within a small number of local facilities, to ensure that the ‘3 frontiers’ of swimming (please see The ASA national research for clarity on the ‘3 frontiers’) are improved.


The impact that we will ultimately be measuring in the pilot will be:

• Awareness of the facility and swimming opportunities available in the local community
• Customer satisfaction with all elements of the swimming experience
• Workforce perception that the culture is centered around providing a great experience for the customer
• Swimming attendance / throughput
• Visitors to the facility/swimming pool are more representative of the profile of the local community (and an increase in)