The children and communities of Falkirk are about to lose vital educational facilities. The council are proposing to close the pools at Falkirk High, Larbert High, Graeme High and Grangemouth High schools. In doing so the young people at each of these schools along with the pupils of all 23 primary schools who feed into them will lose a vital resource and the opportunity to learn a life saving skill. If time and transport can be arranged for pupils to use other pools there will be a knock on detrimental effect on the pupils in those schools as they will have to share pool time. Therefor all pupils studying Physical Education would be disadvantaged in their National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher qualifications.

In this time of increased poverty and cost of living hikes families are less and less able to fund private swimming lessons and fewer young people will have the opportunity to learn to swim. The physical and mental benefits of swimming have long been proven, it is the best low impact cardio workout you can get!

The council have seem to have no set plans as to how these closed areas would then be used or the exact costs of transforming these spaces into "general purpose areas", they do not seem to have taken into account the cost in both money and educational time of transporting young people to other pools for lessons or indeed how this would then be timetabled. It would then impact on the users if the other council area pools as time would need to be found for these pupils.

Losing these pools will also be detrimental to the wider community. There are a number of swimming clubs who use these venues for training, the number of community swimming classes and swim sessions will need to be slashed while there are people currently on waiting lists for lessons.

Please take immediate action and sign this petition.