A Combined Task Test to assess the Motor Dimension of Aquatic Literacy in the ALFAC Project: The ‘Parcours’

Aquatic activities (AA) are promoted for their health benefits (1-4), and the fact that positive childhood experiences have a significant impact on lifelong engagement (5) should encourage educators to provide maximum pleasure and confidence to children who discover this aquatic environment in a water safe manner.
However, these benefits can be tragically overshadowed if children are not empowered with protective skills against drowning. This “dark side” of aquatic recreation is partly responsible for the deaths of about 37,000 lives lost in Europe every year (6). Identified as the second leading cause of death among children, the school-age population appears particularly vulnerable when being active in, on and around the water. According to the WHO, this terrible observation is not a fatality and could be greatly reduced by a series of measures such as improving the quality of swimming education from an early age. This appears to be a key for better protecting children while equipping them with the water competencies that will enable them to safely engage in aquatic environments (7).
To tackle this dual aquatic issue, a partnership has been built between researchers, educators, and stakeholders from Europe around the ALFAC (Aquatic Literacy For All Children) project, co-funded by the European Commission.
The goal is to improve the quality of aquatic education while increasing the Aquatic Literacy (AL) levels of children aged 6-12, to better protect them from the dangers of being active in the water, while motivating them to engage in AA in the long-term. For that reason, the consortium aims to create diagnostic and pedagogical tools to raise the AL level of children through a collaborative project.
The ten full partners come from seven countries with different drowning accident rates and are involved in the education or organizing swimming. In each country, a network has been formed to be as close as possible to the pedagogical, cultural, and structural issues.
This intersecting view between scientific research and practitioners’ feedbacks around the topic of AL, presents an example of a collaborative project that addresses the issue of promotion of AA while preventing drowning among young Europeans.