While Water Babies has long been established as the largest baby and toddler swim school in the world, teaching over 80,000 0–4-year-olds every year, it’s now set to move into the children’s swimming lesson market, by expanding its offering threefold and immediately becoming the largest children’s swimming lesson provider in the UK.
It’s also the only baby swimming school with its own pool consultancy service, passing on its expertise to pools across the globe. Water Babies is also the only swim company to have its own in-house, award winning underwater baby photography unit.
The Swimvincible programme has been developed by the Aquatics experts at Water Babies for all children aged 4+, regardless of ability. Children will be able to join a class appropriate to their level to establish and develop crucial swimming and life-saving skills.
The fun-packed programme will teach the foundations of swimming and promote a lifelong love of water through exciting ‘quests’ such as diving, snorkeling, water polo and artistic swimming. Diving away from the monotonous lengths children might be used to performing in boring swimming lessons, Swimvincible will grow their love of the water whilst fuelling their confidence and skill.
1 in 4 children swim weekly – that’s 1.92million young people. Yet, almost 1 in 3 cannot swim the statutory 25m when they leave school (source: Swim England).
It’s also estimated that 667,000 children in the UK are missing out on swimming lessons due to a lack of teachers and lesson availability (source: Swim England- Audit 2022).
Meanwhile, in a recent survey, 99% of parents agreed that swimming is a vital life skill, yet 63% cited lack of available lessons as the reason their child was not currently learning to swim (source: STA survey 2025).
Water Babies operates at over 560 pools across the UK, through a network of 56 franchises and over 600 teachers. By expanding their trusted, market-leading offering to older children, Water Babies will hugely increase the number of swimming lessons available across the UK over the course of the next year.
Water Babies CEO Howard Harrison said: “Water Babies is a well-known and well-loved brand that upholds the highest standards of swimming teaching both in terms of the qualifications our teachers hold and the experience our learners have in the pool.
We have an ambitious vision for the company to teach 140,000 children every week across 8 countries by 2029 — up from 50,000 children in 6 countries today. We recently took a huge step toward that goal by launching Water Babies in the USA, expanding our potential customer base.
Launching the Swimvincibles programme in the UK creates a huge opportunity for us to offer more lessons to more people here in our home market. This is the next big step toward achieving our vision, and it will create the potential for huge growth for our franchisees.”
