After years of fundraising and hundreds of children missing out on lessons, swimming is back on the curriculum at one Chertsey school. 

Stepgates Community School has been granted planning permission for an outdoor swimming pool after raising thousands of pounds to fund the build. 

Parents and children at the school have been hosting curry nights, auctions, cake sales and challenges to raise the cash needed and the head teacher has welcomed the chance to put swimming lessons back in the school timetable. 

Over £70,000 was raised in seven years with the rest of the money needed for the £100,000 target being met by donations. 

One charity supporting the work was the foundation set up by Bournemouth goalkeeper Asmir Begovic which helps enable both the building and improvement of recreational facilities in England as well as in his birth country of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in a bid to encourage children to be active. 

Head teacher Tara Ford said the pool will provide much-needed life-saving skills for children living near the rivers, lakes and quarries in Chertsey. 

"We are absolutely over the moon to have been granted planning permission to build a replacement pool at Stepgates after our old pool was condemned seven and a half years ago," she said.

“We have been fundraising since then and finally have enough money for an outdoor pool; we will continue to fundraise towards building some sort of enclosure to enable us to use it year-round.

“Chertsey is a town surrounded by water – rivers, lakes, quarries and ponds – and yet at least 80 per cent of our children do not experience regular swimming lessons outside of school. 

“Our in-house pool will allow us to provide our children with a hugely important life-saving skill and enables us to provide a broader, richer curriculum enhancing the quality of their education.

“I would like to personally thank all the former and current pupils, parents, staff, governors and members of the local community who have tirelessly supported us in this endeavour.”

The outdoor pool replaces an indoor pool which was closed in 2015 and has since been demolished. 

A lack of sufficient funding meant the school could not replace it with another indoor pool so it opted for an open air pool. 

The new pool will be enclosed by a two metre high wooden fence. Children will use changing rooms already provided in the school. 

It will only be hired out to the community in spring or summer months. 

Permission was granted by Runnymede Borough Council’s planning committee on Wednesday, December 5. 

Lucy Taylor, chairman of the swimming pool working group and a parent governor at the school for eight years, said at the meeting: “We would very much like to build an indoor pool at the school; that was the original intention. But it’s simply not affordable for the school to do this.”

Residents living nearby said they were concerned about the noise it would generate and potential harm to the environment with the use of electricity and more chlorine because it is an open-air pool. 

But Mrs Taylor said it would not be a “particularly noisy activity” at the school. She said the pool would be primarily used in summer months.