We were enlisted to support a financial pledge from Kellogg’s to improve the quantity and quality of school swimming across England. Working with the Amateur Swimming Association, Kellogg’s wished to build upon its 15 year involvement in British Swimming and lead a campaign calling on Government to take swift action to tackle the decline in pupils leaving school able to swim.
We created a report, pulling together existing drowning figures from RoSPA, responses to an FOI from Kellogg's seeking Local Authority data on number of primary school leavers able to swim and commissioned fresh research from our sister agency Opinion Matters among parents of Primary and Secondary school children to establish a nationwide picture of swimming. The report results showed one in three primary school leavers left school unable to swim; a figure that is likely to increase as Government cuts take effect. The report was used as a basis for a manifesto presented to all three political parties calling for quick and decisive action to save the only sport that saves lives.
With spokespeople including Rebecca Adlington’s mum Kay, former Olympian and Kellogg's ambassador Steve Parry and the ASA's Head of Youth Participation Jon Glenn we conducted a morning of broadcast interviews, with Steve live on the Daybreak sofa as Kay broadcast live from a pool in Mansfield all morning for the same show, giving six items of coverage across one morning. BBC Breakfast, Radio 5 Live, Radio 2, talkSPORT and Sky News ran the story throughout the morning, gaining a total of 300 TV and radio broadcast opportunities. We also created a hard-hitting video feature with the spokespeople, Olympians and bereaved grandparents whose grandson drowned in 2011. To date the video has secured over 50,000 views, featuring in Huffington Post, The Sun Online and the Daily Record.