If you have been searching for information about SwimMark accreditation, you are not alone. For years SwimMark was Swim England’s quality mark for swimming clubs, a badge that showed your club met certain standards around governance, safeguarding and coaching. New committee members still ask how to get it.
The short answer for 2026 is that SwimMark is paused, not replaced, and the tool clubs are pointed to in the meantime is the Club Health Tracker. The tracker is a voluntary annual self assessment that scores your club across six areas of club life and benchmarks it against other clubs. It is not a pass or fail accreditation, and it is not the thing that keeps you affiliated. That is Club Affiliation, which is a separate and compulsory annual process.
This guide explains what the Club Health Tracker is, what it measures, who completes it, and how it sits alongside the affiliation requirements you genuinely cannot skip.
What happened to SwimMark?
Swim England announced in November 2024 that it was pausing the SwimMark accreditation scheme for future submissions while a new framework to support the long-term development of clubs is created. The decision followed a six-month review drawing on insight from clubs, volunteers, stakeholders and operators. The conclusion was that completing SwimMark had become compliance focused, took too much time, and was no longer seen as a development tool by clubs or regions. Swim England set out the reasoning in its own announcement, SwimMark paused as Swim England looks to develop new framework.
One finding from that review is worth quoting to any committee that is unsure where it stands. Swim England reported confusion among club volunteers who believed SwimMark was a mandatory requirement to remain affiliated, “which is not the case”. It never was, and the tracker that clubs are now pointed to is not mandatory either. More on that below.
Three points matter for committees:
- Clubs can no longer make new SwimMark submissions. If your club was working towards accreditation, that route is closed for now.
- Existing accreditation is not cancelled. More than 600 clubs were SwimMark accredited at the time of the pause. Those clubs can continue to display the logo and use the SwimMark portal to reach their documents, and the associated benefits remain, until the new framework is announced.
- A replacement framework is in development. SwimMark will only be withdrawn formally once that framework is in place, so “SwimMark has been abolished” is not quite right either.
The distinction matters if you are writing club policies, applying for funding, or updating a website that still advertises accreditation. A paused scheme and a withdrawn scheme are not the same thing, and your club’s existing status is still valid.
What is the Club Health Tracker?
The Club Health Tracker is an online platform, delivered for Swim England by Sporting Insights and launched in December 2022, that helps aquatic clubs assess and improve how they operate. It asks multiple choice questions across six areas of club life, then shows the club its results against benchmark averages for other clubs.
Here is how it works in practice:
- Self-assessment survey. Once a year, each discipline within your club, whether swimming, diving, water polo or artistic swimming, completes a survey covering six development areas.
- Benchmarking results. Your scores appear in interactive charts and tables alongside averages from other clubs regionally and nationally, showing where you are strong and where you are behind.
- Tailored support. Based on the scores, the tracker points the club towards resources, case studies and examples of good practice relevant to its weaker areas.
- Escalation where it is needed. The system flags clubs that appear to need urgent help, so regional staff can offer one to one support rather than waiting for the club to ask.
Swim England’s own overview sits on the Club Health Tracker page, and Sporting Insights has published a case study describing how the platform was built and what it reports.
Is the Club Health Tracker compulsory?
No, and this is the single most common misunderstanding about it.
The Club Health Tracker is a development tool that clubs are invited and encouraged to complete each year. There is no penalty for skipping it and no accreditation attached to finishing it. Take-up reflects that. Swim England’s own figures record 246 clubs and club sections completing it in year one (2023) and 253 in year two (2024), set against a club base where more than 600 clubs alone held SwimMark accreditation. Useful numbers of clubs take part, but it is plainly not a universal return.
What you cannot skip is Club Affiliation. Swim England’s SwimMark announcement is explicit that clubs “must continue to ensure they meet the mandatory requirements of Club Affiliation every 12 months”. It is the minimum standard of safe and effective practice, it is renewed annually, and failure to maintain it can result in the club being suspended, which affects every club activity. Swim England describes the process on its Club Affiliation page.
Club Affiliation versus the Club Health Tracker
| Club Affiliation | Club Health Tracker | |
|---|---|---|
| Compulsory? | Yes, annually | No, invited and encouraged |
| Purpose | Prove the club meets the minimum standard | Help the club see where to develop |
| Outcome | Approved, or the club risks suspension | Scores and benchmarks, no pass or fail |
| Who submits | The club, through the governance portal | Each discipline section, via emailed login |
| What it asks for | Documentary evidence | Multiple choice answers about how you operate |
Affiliation asks for evidence rather than opinions. The evidence set covers the club constitution, a welfare officer statement of compliance confirming the club is run in line with Wavepower, a chair statement of compliance on the Code of Ethics and role descriptions, risk assessments for club activities, the club personnel report downloaded from the Online Membership System, and an equality, diversity and inclusion plan with evidence of CPD. Regions publish their own checklists and the exact requirements are updated from time to time, so work from your region’s current guidance and Swim England’s affiliation page rather than from a previous year’s paperwork. Our guide to Swim England Stronger Affiliation walks through all six evidence items, who at the club owns each one, and the order to tackle them in.
If your constitution is the item holding you up, our guide to what a swim club constitution is and how to change one covers the model constitution route and the regional approval step.
The six core areas
The tracker assesses clubs across these six areas. Each one maps onto a part of club life that a committee already worries about, so it is worth reading them as a prompt list even if you never submit the survey.
1. Coaching and teaching
Quality and qualifications of your coaching team, coach development, retention and the coaching environment you provide. Clubs that score badly here often have one head coach carrying everything and no plan for what happens when that person moves on. Structured squad training sessions and a written development path for assistant coaches are what move the score.
2. Financial management
Budgeting, financial planning, reserves, payment collection and financial transparency. This is where a club that has never built a proper budget usually finds out. Our swim club budget planning guide walks through building one from your actual cost lines, and the treasurer’s guide to Direct Debit covers the collection side that eats most treasurer hours.
3. Pool operator relationships
Your relationship with the facility you use, negotiation of pool time, communication and understanding of mutual responsibilities. Most clubs treat pool hire as a fixed cost handed down to them rather than a commercial relationship they can influence. Our guide to negotiating pool hire and lane time covers what actually moves a rate and what a written hire agreement should contain.
4. Governance and standards
Committee structure, role definitions, policies covering safeguarding, code of conduct and complaints, AGM compliance and record keeping. The overlap with Club Affiliation is heavy here, so improving one usually improves the other. See committee roles and responsibilities and the legal requirements for a swimming club AGM. If safeguarding record keeping is the weak point, DBS check tracking and what Wavepower compliance actually requires are the two to read.
5. Growth
Membership numbers, retention, waiting lists, recruitment and your approach to trials and taster sessions. Clubs tend to focus on recruitment and ignore the leak at the other end. Our guides to running trials and taster sessions and improving membership retention deal with both halves.
6. Volunteers
Volunteer recruitment, training, recognition, burnout prevention and succession planning for committee roles. This is the area most likely to be scored optimistically and most likely to be the real problem. Volunteer burnout and a proper committee handover checklist are the practical starting points.
How to access the Club Health Tracker
If your club is affiliated with Swim England:
- Check the club secretary’s inbox. Club secretaries receive login details by email for each section of the club when the tracker opens. Search for “Club Health Tracker” if you are not sure whether it arrived.
- Each discipline completes separately. If you have a swimming section and a diving section, both complete their own assessment and get their own benchmarks.
- Involve the committee. Swim England says the tracker takes around 10 to 15 minutes to complete once you have the information to hand, and it publishes the questions in advance so you can gather that information first. The form is not the work. Getting the committee to agree what the honest answer is, before anyone types it in, is where the value sits.
What you get back
Once you submit, the tracker returns:
- Your scores in each of the six areas.
- Regional benchmarks comparing you to clubs in your area.
- National benchmarks showing where you sit more broadly.
- Recommendations and resources targeted at your lower-scoring areas, including case studies and examples of good practice.
- Escalation where scores suggest urgent difficulty, so regional staff can offer direct support.
For a sense of the scale you are being measured against, Swim England published a national club health score of 78 per cent in year one, with governance and standards the strongest area nationally at an average of 91 per cent, and reported the overall national score holding at 78 per cent in year two. Governance scoring highest across the country is not a surprise, because it is the area that overlaps most heavily with the affiliation evidence clubs already have to produce.
The scores themselves are less useful than the gaps they expose. A club that comes out below the benchmark on volunteers and financial management has just been handed the two agenda items for its next committee meeting, whatever the exact numbers were.
Why this is worth doing anyway
Nothing compels you to complete the tracker, so the honest question is whether it earns the time. The form itself is short, so what you are really deciding is whether to give one committee meeting slot to the conversation behind it.
For most clubs it does, for one reason: it forces a conversation the committee otherwise keeps postponing. Clubs limp along with the same weaknesses for years. One volunteer doing three roles. No succession plan. Payment collection that depends on someone chasing standing orders manually. A pool relationship nobody has renegotiated since 2019. The tracker puts each of those in front of you as a question you have to answer out loud.
The practical benefits:
- Problems surface before they become crises. Weak governance and volunteer overload usually show up in a self assessment well before they explode at an AGM.
- Benchmark data helps you argue for change. “We are well below the regional average on coach retention” carries more weight with a reluctant committee than one person’s opinion.
- It focuses limited volunteer energy. Committees have finite time. A ranked list of weaknesses tells you where to spend it.
- Support is attached to the results. Low scores route you to resources and, where the picture is serious enough, to regional staff.
Common pitfalls
Treating it as a tick-box exercise
The problem: because the form only takes 10 to 15 minutes, one person quietly completes it alone and nobody else ever sees the questions. The fix: schedule a committee session to go through it together. The conversations you have while answering are usually worth more than the final score.
Not actioning the results
The problem: you get your scores, feel briefly concerned about the low ones, then forget about it until next year. The fix: at the next committee meeting after results arrive, pick one area to work on for the quarter. Trying to fix all six at once means fixing none.
Comparing yourself to the wrong clubs
The problem: national averages can mislead if you are a fifty-member club measuring yourself against clubs several times your size. The fix: weight the regional benchmarks more heavily and track your own year-on-year movement, which is the comparison that actually reflects your work.
Letting one strong section mask a weak one
The problem: a multi discipline club that treats the tracker as a single form loses the discipline-level detail. The fix: make sure each section completes its own assessment. A thriving swimming section can hide a struggling diving section for years.
Assuming it covers your affiliation
The problem: the committee completes the tracker, feels it has done its Swim England paperwork, and misses the affiliation evidence deadline. The fix: treat them as two separate jobs in the club calendar. One keeps you affiliated. The other helps you improve.
Where club management software fits
The tracker identifies what needs fixing. It does not fix anything, and several of the six areas are really questions about whether your admin is under control.
- Financial management: automated Direct Debit collection, transparent billing and reporting you can take to a committee meeting rather than rebuild each month.
- Governance and standards: compliance tracking, DBS renewal alerts and a digital audit trail that survives a change of welfare officer.
- Volunteers: less time chasing subscriptions and updating spreadsheets, and handovers that transfer records rather than the contents of somebody’s laptop.
- Growth: a managed trials process, waiting list visibility and parent self-service registration.
That is the case for modern club management software generally, not just for Swimly. If you are weighing options, our guide to choosing swim club management software sets out the criteria.
What to do next
If your club has not engaged with the tracker this year:
- Confirm your Club Affiliation is current first. It is the compulsory one and it carries a suspension risk.
- Find the login email in the club secretary’s inbox.
- Download the questions in advance and put them on a committee agenda, so the answers are agreed rather than guessed by whoever happens to hold the login.
- Answer honestly. An optimistic self assessment produces a comfortable score and no useful information.
- Diarise a follow-up a week after results arrive, and pick one area to improve this quarter.
If you are a new committee member who came here asking what replaced SwimMark, the accurate answer is that nothing has replaced it yet. Keep your affiliation in order, use the Club Health Tracker as the development tool it is, and watch for the new framework Swim England is building.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Swim England Club Health Tracker?
The Club Health Tracker is an online self-assessment and benchmarking tool for Swim England affiliated clubs, delivered for Swim England by Sporting Insights and launched in December 2022. Each discipline section of a club answers multiple choice questions across six areas of club life, then sees its scores compared against averages from other clubs regionally and nationally, along with resources aimed at the areas where it scored lowest.
Is the Club Health Tracker mandatory for swimming clubs?
No. The Club Health Tracker is a development tool that clubs are invited and encouraged to complete each year, not a condition of affiliation. The annual process that is compulsory is Club Affiliation, Swim England’s minimum standard, and a club that fails to maintain it faces suspension. It is worth knowing the difference, because the two are often confused.
Has SwimMark been replaced by the Club Health Tracker?
Not formally. Swim England announced in November 2024 that it was pausing SwimMark accreditation for new submissions while it develops a new club development framework, and SwimMark will only be withdrawn officially once that framework is in place. Clubs that already held SwimMark at the point of the pause keep their accreditation and its benefits, and can still use the logo and the SwimMark portal, until the new framework is announced. The Club Health Tracker is the tool clubs are pointed to in the meantime, rather than a like for like successor.
What are the six areas of the Club Health Tracker?
Coaching and teaching, financial management, pool operator relationships, governance and standards, growth, and volunteers. Each section of the survey asks multiple choice questions about how the club currently operates in that area, and each produces its own score and benchmark comparison.
What is the difference between Club Affiliation and the Club Health Tracker?
Club Affiliation is the compulsory annual minimum standard. Clubs submit evidence to Swim England covering areas such as the club constitution, welfare officer and chair statements of compliance, risk assessments, the club personnel report and an equality, diversity and inclusion plan, and missing it can lead to suspension. The Club Health Tracker is voluntary, produces no pass or fail, and exists to help the committee see where the club is strong and where it needs to develop.
Who at the club should complete the Club Health Tracker?
Club secretaries receive login details by email for each section of the club, so a multi discipline club completes a separate assessment for swimming, diving, water polo and artistic swimming. One person can technically fill it in, but the answers are more accurate and far more useful when the committee works through the questions together in a dedicated meeting.
Keep the admin side under control. Swimly handles compliance tracking, membership and billing for UK swimming clubs, so the areas the tracker scores you on are less dependent on one volunteer’s spare evenings. Clubs under fifty members are free. See our pricing or compare us with SwimClub Manager.