Australia’s aquatics workforce faces increasing pressure to deliver high‑quality, compliant training while responding to workforce shortages, evolving industry expectations, and learner needs across diverse contexts. This presentation explores an innovative collaboration between three leading Registered Training Organisations — SWIM, AUSTSWIM, and Royal Life Saving — to strengthen VET delivery through shared expertise, alignment of standards, and a learner‑centred approach.

Drawing on real examples from cross‑RTO cooperation, this session examines how collaboration can enhance training quality, support trainers and assessors, and raise professional standards across the swim and aquatic industry. Attendees will gain insight into the practical enablers, challenges, and benefits of working beyond organisational silos to deliver consistent, future‑focused VET outcomes that better serve learners, industry, and the community.

This presentation shares a practical delivery model built around three levers: Parents, Providers, and Policy. Parents are central because routine drives retention, and families respond best to clear guidance linked to a child's weekly experience. Providers, including private swim schools, council programs, school swim providers, and community-led services, offer structured progression, development-informed teaching, and instructor continuity that supports confidence and skill acquisition over time. A local convenor, typically council or a backbone organisation, coordinates a registered provider panel and single referral pathway from schools, community services, and health.

Policy is treated as an enabling partner. Many subsidy and voucher systems exist, each with strengths and trade-offs in reach, administration, and alignment to safety outcomes. Our recommended approach is a direct-to-family voucher dedicated exclusively to learn-to-swim, redeemed through registered providers. Learn-to-swim is a prevention intervention, and a dedicated voucher protects that intent by linking funding to a defined skill pathway, reducing intermediary bloat, keeping choice with families, and improving transparency. This is offered as a design lesson drawn from current programs, not a one-size-fits-all prescription.

We compare two live examples. Queensland's SwimStart is learn-to-swim focused with positive sector engagement, though implementation realities such as provider availability and program settings can limit reach. Victoria's Get Active Kids supports a broader activity mix, illustrating how participation uplift can dilute safety intent unless learn-to-swim outcomes are explicitly protected.
Lessons Learned

Models work best when support flows directly to families, providers meet clear quality and safeguarding expectations, and reporting focuses on what matters: attendance, continuation at 12 weeks, and progress against a benchmark families understand.

This presentation will highlight the positive impact and contribution that multiple projects have benefitted from based on partnerships with multiple industry organisations which have been purposefully established and cultivated. It will focus on the establishment, evolution and evaluation of partnerships with appropriate references to relevant projects and initiatives. Domestic industry partners have so far included Royal Life Saving Australia, Royal Life Saving Queensland, Life Saving Victoria, AUSTSWIM, Swimming Australia, LIWA, Active Queensland Industry Alliance and SWIM coaches & Teachers Australia. Partnerships with these organisations have including the following projects (note: not all partners have been involved in all projects); GSPO provision, SWIMSAFER Week, SWIMCON25, Joint Trainer Workshops, International Women’s Day event, Queensland, Victorian and WA Education Department teacher training, AquaJobs Workforce capability project in Queensland.

The completion phase of each project includes some form of evaluation. For some projects this is informal while others have evaluation requirements built into the project funding requirements/contracts. Regardless of formal or informal, each review includes a focus on how the partners engaged, benefitted and collaborated. This discipline has allowed partnerships to flourish and evolve from project to project. Lessons learned include the need to be brave, bold and vulnerable initially, to be honest and forthright continually and to establish and maintain shared values and behaviours as a core tenet.

Water safety and drowning prevention in Australia has traditionally been underfunded and fragmented. The establishment and evolution of Purposeful Partnerships had its genesis in the aftermath of COVID in an effort to synergise and optimise our individual and collective drowning prevention activities. It was heavily aligned with the National Drowning Prevention Strategy and grounded in the principles of the integrity, trust and commonality. The oft misquoted Aristotle applies “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”.

Catalytic uplift in safety outcomes across our coastlines requires that we not only establish and strengthen new local partnerships, but that we also expand the geography of those partnerships to match the scale of the challenge.
This presentation provides insight into the development, implementation and collaboration across two key streams of beach safety innovation in Victoria: the development of Victoria's first Cross-Council Water Safety Framework, and community leadership from Dr Harpreet Singh Kandra of the Officer Gurdwara. Together, this partnership has delivered high-impact drowning prevention activities, a clear agenda for future collaboration, and a replicable model for localising water safety efforts while scaling impact.
Building on local collaboration across land managers and response agencies, Bass Coast Council partnered with Life Saving Victoria, Mornington Peninsula Council and three inland Councils to research and launch Victoria's first Bass Coast-Mornington Peninsula Cross-Council Water Safety Framework. The Framework formalises regional collaboration to address drowning risk, with a strong focus on multicultural community safety. It has supported key messaging, signage trials, events, enhanced risk assessment and industry engagement, and serves as a sandbox for innovation and research with academic and government partners.
A key tenet of the Framework is that government's role is to amplify locally driven initiatives through genuine co-design with community leaders and collective impact.
The Officer Gurdwara (Sikh temple) ‘Siri Guru Nanak Darbar’ is a key partner - building on their pilot ‘Safely Engaging with Water’ program to influence policy and programs at state level. Their work has empowered multicultural communities to engage with water and understand water safety, demonstrating a successful co-contribution model scalable across aquatic environments.
This presentation outlines the objectives and achievements of this partnership and demonstrates a model that is replicable not just geographically, but across priority communities - with possible future directions for enhanced impact and collaboration.

Background
Drowning prevention in Australia depends not only on effective interventions, but also on how those interventions are implemented across complex systems. Existing implementation science frameworks offer useful structure, but applying them in water safety raises practical challenges, including fragmented governance, short-term funding, and the need to work across sectors and settings. The Water Safety Implementation Project (WSIP) is using a staged process to refine an implementation framework that is both theoretically robust and practical for practitioners.
Objective
This presentation focuses on the process of testing of the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR) for drowning prevention and the challenges identified through that work, with particular emphasis on how a Delphi process helped identify what fits, what is missing, and what matters most in a limited decision-making space.
Methods
WSIP used interviews (n=12) and a three-round Delphi survey with practitioners and researchers (n=48), to test the relevance of the CFIR domains and constructs for drowning prevention and water safety interventions. The Delphi process enabled structured consensus-building while also creating space to capture areas where participants felt the framework did not fully reflect implementation realities.
Results
The Delphi process showed broad support for CFIR as a starting point. Strong consensus was reached on constructs such as adaptability, engaging and assessing target group needs, and reflecting and evaluating. Participants also highlighted additional priorities, including equity, communicating community feedback, and the use of theory. Across the interviews, system-level influences consistently emerged as a challenge that required more explicit attention.
Conclusions
The research approach helped surface shared priorities, expose gaps, and make visible the implementation challenges practitioners face but frameworks can overlook. These findings support the inclusion of a system-level environment domain in the Water Safety Implementation Framework and reinforce the value of consensus methods in adapting implementation science for real-world drowning prevention practice.

Different environments, shared goal- every child safe around water.”
Why This Matters
• Snapshot of drowning risk in Australia (focus on children 0–14)
• Emphasise preventability
• The challenge: inconsistent messaging across jurisdictions can confuse families

• Community education
• Practical, hands-on safety advice
• Trusted voice for families
• Partnerships with health, education, and community sectors
Shared Messages Across Tasmania & Queensland
Core consistent messages:
• Active adult supervision at all times
• Learn to swim and water familiarisation
• Safe environments (barriers, maintenance, hazard awareness)
• Emergency readiness (CPR knowledge)
Key point:
Consistency builds recognition, trust, and behaviour change.
Tasmania Context -Unique Challenges
• Cooler climate -underestimation of drowning risk
• Inland waterways (rivers, dams, lakes) widely used
• Rural and regional access challenges
• Older housing stock -varying pool safety compliance
• Seasonal engagement (summer spikes)
Messaging nuance:
Focus on hidden risks, cold water, and supervision in natural environments.

Queensland Context -Unique Challenges
• Warmer climate -year-round water exposure
• High pool ownership
• Beach and tourism environments
• Cultural diversity and transient populations
• Flood and extreme weather risks
Messaging nuance:
High-frequency exposure, pool safety compliance, and culturally appropriate communication.

Where We Align
• Same evidence base
• Same core safety behaviours
• Shared campaign language (e.g., supervision, barriers, skills)
• Alignment with national frameworks and Royal Life Saving Society Australia guidance
Where We Adapt
• Delivery methods (urban vs rural, climate differences)
• Visual imagery (local relevance)
• Timing (seasonal vs year-round messaging)
• Community partnerships (local councils, services, schools)

The Power of Working Together
• Amplified reach across states
• Shared resources= cost-effective delivery
• Stronger advocacy voice
• Reduced confusion for families moving between states
Key message:
A child in Hobart and a child in Brisbane should hear the same life-saving advice.