Insufficient swimming education leading to drowning in open water
Department for Education received 2 coroners' reports about this hazard between 18 Jan 2018 and 10 Oct 2024.
They came from 2 different coroners in 2 coroner areas. A similar concern was raised again 1 time after the first warning.
A published response was found for 1 of the 1 earlier reports, stating 1 specific action.
The story, report by report
Spacing grows with the time between reports.
“He said that in this country schools do not teach children to swim to a sufficiently high standard to be safe.”
Original on judiciary.uk ↗ Department for Education responded, stating 1 specific action.Response (PDF) ↗
“we tasked an independent group of experts from across the swimming sector to submit an independent report seiting out recommendations for improving curriculum swimming as part of the Sporting Future strategy. The group published their report in July 2017 and we subsequently established an implementation group, and are currently reviewing the recommendations in the report. In”
Stated timescale: July 2017
- 6 years 9 months laterClosely relatedConfidence 0.85 · higha different coroner
“March 2020, has shown that 1 in 4 children do not get access to this education.”
Original on judiciary.uk ↗ Department for Education responded.Response (PDF) ↗
- All reports to Department for Education
Each row is one judged link between an earlier and a later report. Open a row to read both quotes, found word for word in the originals.
2018 → 2024Joseph Abbess & Sunnah Khan6 years 9 months after Abdul-Jamal Ottun · different coronerClosely relatedConfidence 0.85 · high
Closely relatedConfidence 0.85 · highBoth reports highlight insufficient swimming and water‑safety education as a factor contributing to preventable drownings among children.
Abdul-Jamal Ottun · 18 Jan 2018
“He said that in this country schools do not teach children to swim to a sufficiently high standard to be safe.”
Original on judiciary.uk ↗ Joseph Abbess & Sunnah Khan · 10 Oct 2024
“March 2020, has shown that 1 in 4 children do not get access to this education.”
Original on judiciary.uk ↗
Stated action · timescale: July 2017
“we tasked an independent group of experts from across the swimming sector to submit an independent report seiting out recommendations for improving curriculum swimming as part of the Sporting Future strategy. The group published their report in July 2017 and we subsequently established an implementation group, and are currently reviewing the recommendations in the report. In”
No specific action could be extracted with a verified quote.
- Each report's concerns were extracted by Nemotron 3 Nano on Nebius Token Factory, each with a quote copied from the report.
- Concerns from reports to Department for Education at least six months apart were compared by meaning (Qwen3 embeddings) and wording (TF-IDF).
- The closest pairs were judged by Nemotron 3 Super with reasoning on. Only identical or closely related, with confidence of at least 0.70, are shown.
- Every quote was checked by code as an exact substring of the original text. Names of staff and family are redacted, and the deceased are named by report title only.
| Link | Meaning | Wording | Judge | Coroner |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 → 2024 | 0.64 | 0.12 | Closely related · 0.85 | different |
Judge model: nvidia/nemotron-3-super-120b-a12b. How Nemotron did the work · Full methodology.
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This shows that a similar concern was raised again after an earlier report. It does not say why, and it is not a finding about any organisation or person. To report an error, see the corrections route.