Nicole Durrant has been a trainer with Royal Life Saving WA for nine years, and leads courses from Bronze Medallion, which teaches personal survival skills and water rescues, to Heart Beat Club, our child first aid and safety program. Nicole still remembers when she completed her own Bronze Medallion qualification when she was 14 years old!
Although Nicole is based in Perth she is always ready and willing to take on regional training opportunities, sharing her skills and knowledge with communities across some of the most remote parts of our state. Nicole says she finds the work extremely rewarding “working with people from diverse backgrounds, sharing knowledge that could save someone’s life and the amazing people I have the opportunity to meet is what makes working for Royal Life Saving WA such a pleasure.”
Recently Nicole took up the challenge of travelling out the remote communities in the Goldfields region, thanks to funding from Principal Community Partner BHP, to share her knowledge with families in Leinster and Leonora. She spent a week in each community teaching people of all ages, from Infant Aquatics for babies and toddlers, to Swim and Survive for school age children and Bronze Medallion for teenagers and adults!
38 children and adults took part in the lessons at Leinster and 26 at Leonora, while at Leinster she also took a number of local schoolteachers through their paces, running an extended Bronze Medallion course. During this time she was also able to take part in the inaugural BHP sponsored Goldfields Spirit Swimming and Lifesaving Carnival, giving children from local communities an opportunity to showcase their newly learnt aquatic skills in a fun and interactive carnival that featured swimming races, lifesaving activities and giveaways!
Nicole says working in regional areas is rewarding for a number of reasons. "I love being involved in regional work for the sense of community and how open to learning and sharing the students can be. It also provides an opportunity to work outside the box and teach across a broad range of abilities. I find that I always meet some great people and learn about the uniqueness of each community or town, and most times it's an opportunity to enjoy hot weather, which I love... not to mention the fact that there's no traffic lights and not having to clean my house!"
Having people like Nicole available and willing to travel to these towns to teach these skills is vitally important for communities across regional WA. Unfortunately, there is a severe shortage of swim instructors in many regional and remote parts of our state, which means that children and families often miss out on learning swimming and water safety skills. Having support from BHP to make the travel for these trainers possible ensures that we can run these programs so that no child misses out on learning to Swim and Survive.
If you're a qualified swim instructor who's willing to travel to regional locations please register your interest at the link below.
If you'd like to start your journey as a swim instructor find out more about our Swim Teacher by Royal Life Saving course below.