Several years ago, I was involved in a survey of parents who had their children actively enrolled in swimming lessons.
The goal of the survey was to identify areas of improvement and what was causing parents the highest levels of dissatisfaction.
This survey involved thousands of parents and hundreds of responses with some of the findings eye-opening.
Of all the responses there were some common themes.
However, one factor caused parents the most dissatisfaction.
This one thing had more than double the number of dissatisfied parents than any other item.
It wasn’t the cleanliness of the changing rooms.
It wasn’t frustration with the high number of teacher swaps.
The number one causes of dissatisfaction for swim school customers was…
Not Getting Enough Feedback About the Progress of Their Child Here
69% of parents surveyed were dissatisfied with the amount of feedback they were getting about their child’s progress.
Although this survey was almost 10 years ago now, the principle remains.
Parents want to know that their child is making progress and are often kept in the dark for too long.
Poor feedback on progress can reduce customer satisfaction and increase customer cancellation.
If you want to have a strong-performing swim school with high retention rates in imperative that you have a strong assessment process.
In this article, we explore 5 ways to improve your assessment process and keep parents satisfied.
5 tips for Improving Your Swim School Assessment Process
1. Give feedback every 90 days
Swim school operators often ask us how often we should assess students.
This is a good question, and you need to strike a balance.
On one hand, more frequent feedback is great, however, if we assess a student every few weeks there may be only a small amount of progress between assessments.
When you provide feedback to parents the ideal scenario is to highlight a significant amount of skill progression.
Another consideration is time and cost.
It takes time for your teachers or deck supervisors to assess students.
If you have 600 students, assessing all of these students is a significant task.
If you assess too frequently you may be adding extra unnecessary work.
Based on these factors we recommend assessing students once every 90 days.
This means parents will get approximately 4 updates each year about their child’s progress.
Any longer than 90 days and the parent will begin to question how their child is progressing.
On the flip side, if you are assessing every 30 days, this can be too much work to maintain.
2. Use level focus weeks to stay on track
If you have committed to assessing students every 90 days, the next challenge is to have a process to keep track of which students to assess and when.
Without a clear process often, staff lose track of which students should be assessed next.
You don’t want some children being assessed twice a month and others not assessed for 6 months.
A good strategy to stay on track is to implement level-focus weeks.
If you are using a deck supervisor approach to assessments this is a particularly good way of keeping on task.
Level-focus weeks work by focusing on one or a small number of your levels when assessing each week.
For example, during week 3 of the term, you may focus on level 6, then in week 4, you focus on assessing level 5 and so on.
Tip: If you work from the highest level down, you often open spaces in higher levels that students from lower levels can progress in.
The key priority here is to ensure each child is assessed regularly because this forms the foundation for providing feedback to parents.
3. Deliver feedback in a scalable way
The next step is to deliver feedback in a scalable way.
Many swim schools give up on assessing students and providing feedback to parents because it’s too time-consuming.
Others have the mistaken belief that if parents ask them, then they can verbally provide feedback about their child’s progress.
The reality is that many parents don’t have the time to proactively ask but are very much wanting to know how their child is progressing.
To make your feedback scalable you know the two following components
- Have a simple and easy-use interface to record skill progress
- Have a time-efficient way to relay that information to the parent.
The easiest way to do this is via a well-designed swim school software with robust skill-tracking functionality.
For example, users of First Class software on a single screen can assess an entire class for all the skills that relate to that class’s level.
This assessment information then instantly becomes available to the parent via the First Class app and customer portal in an easy-to-read and digest format.
You may wish to learn more about using an app to improve communication in your swim school here: Using an app to improve communication
4. Use detailed descriptions when grading skills
A common mistake that swim schools make when assessing is they do not record enough detail when assessing.
Consider a grading system that has two outcomes
- Competent
- Not yet competent
When such a system is in place, this binary approach only gives the parent a small amount of information about a child’s progress for a specific skill.
For example, if a child has 90% mastered a skill but is not yet performing it consistently, not yet competent is still not yet competent.
Having a multi-dimensional grading system can help paint a much clearer picture.
Consider the following
- Introduced
- Improving
- Consolidating
- Competent
In the example immediately above, we could use the consolidating grading option to indicate that the child is in the final stages of mastery of that particular skill.
If you are going to put the time and effort into assessing, then it’s important to use descriptive wording in your grading.
5. Add extra comments to add a personal touch
Sometimes a little extra touch can go a long way.
Adding extra comments to a student’s assessment can provide the parent with further insights beyond what a progress report can give.
An example of a personal comment may be something like “Amy is doing a great job! She has been focusing on her backstroke technique and is showing great improvement”
It doesn’t need to be every assessment, however, a personal comment now and then can be an added touch to the perfect assessment process.
If you want to improve your swim schools’ assessments and skill tracking look no further than First Class. First Class is an all-in-one swim school software that handles everything from scheduling to payments.
For more information go to www.firstclassretention.com/swimschoolsoftware