We have been fielding some feedback over the past week regarding the cost of the upcoming 22P1 Program and thought it would be good to give our families a bit of info as to how the program cost comes about, so you can compare 'apples with apples'.
Please note the following facts you need to consider when comparing program and lesson rates between swim schools:
The DLSA runs a PERPETUAL PROGRAM, which means our weekly lessons continue throughout the school holidays, accept for 2 weeks Xmas/New Year and 1 week in April.
Perpetual Programming is widely considered within the swim school community as the most effective programming approach to teaching Water Safety and Swimming Skills to children.
This equates to 49 weeks a year of lessons, as opposed to just 38 weeks/year provided by some other swim schools. We believe the building Water Safety Skills is an ESSENTIAL part of your child's overall education and development.
When comparing PROGRAM COSTS from one swim school to the next, it is IMPERATIVE to consider how many lessons are you getting for that program cost.
It is more appropriate to compare PER LESSON COST instead when considering value for money.
In October 2021 the DLSA increased our base/standard lesson rate by $1/lesson. THIS BROUGHT US INLINE WITH MOST OF OUR COMPETITOR'S STANDARD PRICING.
Important to note, our Pre Pay and Save and Direct Debit lesson rates are still cheaper than our competitor's standard lesson rate.
In July the DLSA changed booking program to iClass Pro. In doing so, we needed to change the way we plan our program duration, to a standard that could be replicated the same each year going forward. We settled on the following, to give us a 49 week/year weekly lesson schedule:
Program 1 - 13 weeks duration
Program 2 - 12 weeks duration
Program 3 - 12 weeks duration
Program 4 - 12 weeks duration
At the time, making the transition from our old system to the new system, we needed to:
Make the first program, 21P3 an 11 week program to enable us to get into the the ongoing cycle.
21P4 has been a 12 week program and
22P1 will be a 13 week program as it should be.
22P2, P3 & P4 will all be a 12 week program.
However, from a PROGRAM RATE point of view, families may feel that the increase in program cost represents an increase in lesson rate, but this is not the case, accept for the $1/lesson price adjustment in October, the increased program cost has only been due to the increased lessons per program. Going forward we can maintain our standard program duration as outlined above and pricing will 'stabilise'.
We hope this explains the variance in the program cost over the previous months. We thank-you for your patience while we moved to our new booking system. We still have some 'bugs' to sort out, but in general, we feel switching to iClass Pro has been a tremendous success and has offered both us as a swim program and you as a valued customer a lot more flexibility and options.
As always, please do not hesitate to contact our friendly Admin Team if you have any questions or concerns with this or any other issue.