British Swim School at 24 Hour Fitness – San Mateo Super Sport, San Mateo | Fees, Rankings, Address, Admission, Vacancies, Reviews & More

We heard a lot of good things about British Swim School. That’s is why we enrolled my now 5 yo active athletic daughter who initiated herself taking swimming classes almost 6 months ago. The school indeed has tons of convenient locations and are always open, so it’s super easy to do makeup classes. Their app is fantastic! We like that they track our kid’s progress closely. However, tracking progress is one thing but nudging kids to make real progress is quite another! Unfortunately, school is a revolving door with instructors! My kid has a new instructor almost every single class. At this point, none of them gives her real challenge to do something new and exciting or even let her show what she already learned… They mostly do their daily pretty boring routine, wasting precious class time on so much talking, excessive singing, spending the last 10 min on ‘play’ (which looks more like sitting in the pool in a ring than do something interesting and acive!). So not only we don’t see any real improvements here after almost 6 (!) months of taking classes, my kid actually started to regress. She is obviously so ready and willing for more, but looks like they are more interested in keeping her down, because every new instructor starts to get to know her anew and gives her that boring routine she started from back in October 2023. Also it might look that they keep her from real progress to just make more money – the longer she sits class after clas at the basic level with the same extremely boring routine designed for much younger kids, the more classes she would need to take to achieve at least something. At this point we’re pretty disappointed with the school’s one-routine-fits-everyone-and-everytime approach, and would not recommend this school for a child who’s eager and ready to really do stuff to learn how to swim.

I agree with a lot of reviews here. The teachers at British Swim School are caring but do come with varying degree of experience. Rosemary the manager at this location is great and we love her, however the number of kids in a class make it tough for kids to make quick progress. I have been keeping a track of the number of minutes my kid spend per class and it’s total of 6 minutes out of 25 minutes per class (last 5 minutes is play time) while she just sits out of the pool shivering rest of the time since there are 4 kids each class each instructor and there is only 1 kid allowed in the pool at a time at lower levels.

Also, Rosemary tries real hard to let each instructor know what the child needs help with – but I don’t see it being consistently told since there are lot of kids across multiple class at one time.

Also I don’t see the kid getting more time practicing the skill that they are struggling with. For example, my kid is in Minnow (one of the levels) and she has been struggling with something called as Torpedo and she literally spends 1 minute out of 6 minutes (2 turns, sometimes 1) that she is in the pool practicing this skill. With this pace, any kid will take up to a year to graduate from a class. If you are attending 1x per week at $250 per month – you are spending up to $3,000 to learn basics. I don’t think it helps with multiple classes per week either considering how the classes are set up.

This review is for the staff at the San Mateo location. My child started the program as a toddler and she continues to enjoy being in the water and learning today. My child’s teachers are absolute professionals when it comes to working with children of all learning styles. My child’s teachers are caring and they always provide support with me on my child’s progress. The staff really know each child’s goals, comfort level and swim profile and I truly appreciate the consistency in their teaching with each lesson. My child continues to improve and it is all thanks to the supportive staff of San Mateo.