Are you a parent, looking to make a career change into something that works alongside your family life and leaves you feeling rewarded? Well then, we have the perfect job for you.
Turtle Tots are currently expanding and looking for new teachers to join our team across Ireland. And the best bit is that you don’t need to have any experience as a swim teacher to get started. We’ll train you up.
We know that life changes when you have children and the traditional 9-5 job doesn’t always work when you have school runs, childcare, family commitments and little people who need you.
Our teachers typically work around 5-10 hours a week, with classes taking place during weekday mornings and at weekends. Midweek most of our classes start after school drop off times and finish before pick up time.
You’ll need to be available for one weekend day, alongside some midweek teaching, but the part-time nature of the role means it can work really well around family life. Although working a weekend day isn’t for everyone, for some parents, it can be a great way to earn some extra money alongside being at home with their children most of the time. For others, it could be the opportunity to step away from a stressful or unfulfilling career and build something new.
We also work to a school calendar so you’ll be off for Christmas, mid-terms and summer holidays. We teach 4, 10-week terms each year, which means you’ll be working 40 weeks each year all together. The other 12 weeks you’ll be off at times your little ones will be off creche or school too.
There aren’t many jobs where you get to see the difference you’re making every single week. As a Turtle Tots teacher, you’ll be welcoming babies, toddlers and pre-schoolers to the water, helping them to learn new skills, be safe in the water and become more confident in themselves, inside and outside the pool. You’ll also be helping parents to become more confident in handling their children in the water.
It’s an active, social and incredibly rewarding career and you get to spend your working day with little ones rather than sitting behind a desk.
We pay our swim teachers €28.50 per hour as a starting rate. This makes us the top-paying baby & toddler swim school in the country, because we really value the time they put in. We also have a very clear progression path in terms of pay, meaning you have the opportunity to earn more.
That means even a relatively small number of hours each week can provide a useful additional income for your family. And if you’re looking for more hours, there can also be opportunities to take on additional classes.
This is one of the biggest things we want parents to know. You don’t need previous swim-teaching experience and you don’t need to already hold a swim-teaching qualification. We’ll provide the training you need to become a Turtle Tots teacher, including the relevant swimming teacher and lifesaving/rescue training.
So if you’ve been thinking “I’d love to do something like that, but I don’t have the qualifications”, don’t let that put you off. We’re much more interested in finding the right people, and giving them the training and support they need to become great teachers.
Although we want our teachers to have experience with children between the ages of 0-5, you don’t need to have worked with children professionally. We’re looking for people who are kind, playful, energetic, reliable and great with young children.
If you’ve spent the last few years raising your own babies and toddlers, you’ve already developed plenty of experience understanding kids, communicating with them and keeping them engaged. You also understand how daunting it can feel to bring your baby or toddler to a new class and how hard it can be to get out of the house in the early days.
That experience matters.
You don’t have to be a competitive swimmer or someone who has dreamed of becoming a swimming teacher since you were a child. You could simply be a mum who loves being around children, enjoys being active, and wants a job that feels meaningful.
As a Turtle Tots teacher, you’ll deliver swimming lessons for babies, toddlers and pre-schoolers. Your role will include:
Classes are generally held between 10am and 12pm midweek and between 9am and 5pm at weekends, depending on the venue and timetable, meaning it can work around your school drop-offs and pick-ups.
You will need to be able to work one weekend day alongside some midweek hours, have a full driving licence and your own car.
We’re looking for parents who are:
And most importantly, you need to be someone who wants to make a difference.
As well as a €28.50 per hour starting wage, Turtle Tots teachers receive:
And, of course, the opportunity to become part of a team that’s passionate about helping babies and young children become happy and confident in the water.
If this sounds like something you’d love, we’d love to hear from you.
We’re currently recruiting Baby & Toddler Swimming Teachers in locations across Ireland.
You don’t need to have all the qualifications. You just need to have the right attitude, a love of working with little ones and the willingness to learn.
Take a look at our current vacancies and apply today or email us on hr@turtletots.ie
We are delighted to have won a Tots Spots 2026 Award for Best Solo Sport! The Tots Spots Awards are an annual awards program in Ireland designed to recognize and celebrate the best baby, toddler, and children’s classes, groups, and activities.
What makes this award highly meaningful for us is that it is entirely community-driven. Winners and finalists are nominated and voted for directly by the parents, caregivers, and families who attend these classes.
Thanks so much Tots Spots for supporting our baby toddler and preschool swimming lessons, it’s super appreciated.
We WON!
We are turtley thrilled to share that Turtle Tots Ireland has won 
Emerging Franchisor of the Year 2026 at the Irish Franchise Association Awards!
What an unforgettable evening celebrating alongside so many incredible brands — and to come home with this award is a truly proud and emotional milestone in the Turtle Tots journey 
This award is a celebration of every single person who makes Turtle Tots so special…
Our world-class, nurturing teachers
Our brilliant pool partners
And our amazing Turtle Tots families and totters across Ireland
From those very first splishy splashy moments to building lifesaving skills, confidence, and a lifelong love of the water, this recognition belongs to all of you. We’re also incredibly proud to have been finalists in multiple categories — a reflection of the love, dedication, and belief in what we do every single day.
Thank you for being part of this magical journey — we can’t wait to keep growing, inspiring, and helping more little ones become confident in the water
Our children are our most precious gifts and as parents we want to make sure they are always healthy, happy and safe; making sure they are confident, and safe in and around water from an early age is an important part of this.
Getting babies familiarised with aquatic activities from a young age and helping them to develop this lifelong activity is our passion; and we believe the best way to do this is to create a safe, warm environment in which young children can be introduced to water while having lots of fun.
Playing with your baby in water helps them to feel safe and secure, and it helps boost their confidence. This is thanks to the skin-to-skin contact, regular eye contact and big smiles.
Teaching babies in water relies very heavily on this empathy and awareness on the part of the parent. A calm relaxed approach achieves far better results that an anxious fearful one – young babies have no concept of fear, they accept every new experience they are introduced to by smiling or crying, relying on the empathy of their parents to positively guide them.
As specialists in baby and toddler swimming lessons, we also recognise that every child is different, and our lesson programmes have been designed to be truly child-centred. Each child is nurtured, and activities are adapted by our highly trained and skilled teachers to meet each individual’s needs.
To nurture water confidence, we use games, toys, songs, rhymes, blowing bubbles in our lessons to create a playful learning environment, where this is a strong focus on teaching lifesaving skills. We help babies learn the skills they need in a fun way, to help keep them safe in and around water, until they are able to swim independently.
To help you prepare for baby swimming lessons and nurture your baby’s water confidence, here are our top 5 tips:
Bath time is the best way to get your baby used to the water and to build their confidence. For new-borns, water is a natural environment, and fostering this natural affinity to water with fun bath time activities will make the transition to swimming pool much easier.
To ensure they are safe at bath time, fully support your baby and make eye contact, and then encourage them to splash their hands and kick their legs. Introduce sponge toys, and gently sprinkle water over their body using a toy watering can while singing songs or nursery rhymes to help relax them.
Take one of their favourite bath toys along to the pool to play with too; having a familiar toy with them will help your baby to relax and enjoy their first swimming lesson.
If you feel anxious about the water, don’t let this stop you from missing out on the joys of baby swimming because our lessons are the perfect way to help you overcome your nerves – it’s not only our little turtles that our teachers are empathetic with, it’s also the parents and they will guide you at every stage, at your own pace, to ensure you and your baby both have an enjoyable experience in the water.
Swimming with your baby is a special bonding time, but if its your first trip to the pool you might feel a little daunted, so to ensure your experience is a confident and positive one … get everything you need for your lessons ready in advance, i.e., swim nappies, towels etc and check how long it takes to get there. This will help you feel relaxed on the day – and if you are relaxed, baby will feel relaxed too.
This is our motto. During lessons, we encourage our parents to give their baby lots of praise, smiles and eye contact. This will help your baby to feel at ease in the water.
During our lessons, teaching babies how to float is an important lifesaving skill, and we encourage all our parents to use the techniques they’ve learnt in the lessons to carry this on at home at bath time (starting by fully supporting them in the water). Teaching young children how to float is a key skill that could save their life if they fell in water.
But most of all have fun, baby swimming is a magical experience.
There are still some industries working hard to break down perceived gender-stereotyped views when it comes to specific job roles, and you could say we have had to do the same to some degree with baby swimming teaching, which traditionally might have been seen as a female dominant profession. Not because of any particular characteristic of the job, but it mainly appealed to women, mums really, because of the flexibility of the hours in helping to create a balanced family life.
Over the last decade, however, the baby swimming industry has boomed and grown exponentially, and to meet the demand it has been important to create a more balanced workforce and show that baby swimming teaching is a profession for everyone, regardless of age, gender or swimming ability.
Alongside this, is also the fact that men and women have far less “traditional” roles now, and often men are the main carers of children and/or desire a better work life balance and flexibility which is evidenced by the influx of new male teachers coming on to our courses – even more so as well since the pandemic.
Becoming a baby swimming teacher is truly an ideal career choice for everyone, and for some of our teachers a stress-free and rewarding second job that fits around their family.
For university students too, becoming a baby swimming teacher offers so many transferable skills that they can apply in all aspects of their life and their studies – plus the pay and hours are good!
Being a national swim school company as well, we can, and do, give students the opportunity to teach at their local Turtle Tots swim school while they are studying at university, and then to teach at another Turtle Tots swim school when they are home for the summer. It’s a skill they can take anywhere – both here in Ireland and internationally – because they are trained and qualified to the highest recognised standards.
For many of our teachers, they have also been drawn to baby swimming teaching because they have ambitions of running their own business. At Turtle Tots, we have people from all different backgrounds and professions, with no previous experience of swimming, that have swapped the stresses of city life to become teacher so that they can run their own business alongside it, build a flexible work / life balance and grow their income in line with their own ambitions.
Becoming a baby swimming teacher offers so much to so many different people and it’s a highly rewarding job for everyone here at Turtle Tots because you know you are making a real difference by teaching a life skill to parents and children.
Take a look at our recent Day in the Life of a Swimming Teacher video and start a conversation today with us about training to become a baby swimming teacher.
Contact us today and bring on the smiles and bring on the opportunities hr@turtletots.ie
Turtle Tots Ireland has become the first swim school in Ireland to offer group swimming sessions for children with Autism; this follows one of their swimming teacher’s receiving world-class training from Australian-based Autism Swim.
Turtle Tots Ireland has grown to become a major name in the Irish baby swimming market, teaching more than 1000 babies and infants under 4 years old each week across Ireland. More recently, at Club Vitae in The Maldron Hotel in Tallaght they have been working with the Tallaght Parents Autism Support Group (TPASG) to bring specialist ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder)groupswim classes to Ireland for the first time.
Alan said: “Teaching young learners with an ASD/cognitive deficit has traditionally been offered on a private one to one tuition basis but through our partnership with Tallaght Parents Autism Support Group, we recognised the need for children (and their parents) to have the opportunity to access group swimming lessons, where they can socialise together, have fun, and receive the professional support they need to thrive and survive in the water.”
“Thanks to specialist training from Autism Swim, we are proud to become the first in Ireland that can offer group classes that have been designed specifically for this wonderful population group with teachers trained with their needs in mind. In the future, our aim is to open up these sessions to other communities across Ireland,” confirmed Alan.
Autism Swim is widely recognised as world leaders in wandering, drowning prevention and swimming for those with ASD/cognitive deficit.Autism Swim’s training programme has been developed combining the expertise of Autism Specialists, Behaviour Specialists, Occupational Therapists and Swimming Instructors, and gives teachers the knowledge, skills, resources and confidence needed, to most effectively teach swimmers who need extra support in the water – in addition to being able to provide effective advice to parents / carers.
Jo Woods, Head of Aquatics at Turtle Tots said: “I am thrilled that Turtle Tots Ireland is the first to offer group classes for children with Autism and their parents. This is part of a wider company commitment to ensure that our lessons are inclusive for all and cater for the needs of each individual child. We do this by training all our teachers to the very highest standards, not just in swimming technique but also in understanding early non-verbal communication and sensory awareness. By tuning in and responding to each child’s communication cues we can adapt each and every activity to suit that particular child, so every lesson is right for all.”
The first Turtle Tots group classes for children aged 2-6 years old will start at the Club Vitae Gym in the Maldron Hotel Tallaght in September 2020. For further information on Turtle Tots baby and pre-school swimming classes, which have received international recognition by being named amongst the best in family-friendly educational services by the Mom’s Choice Awards, please visit https://www.turtletots.ie/
