Charitable leisure trust Tone Leisure has launched a revolutionary piece of software aimed at significantly reducing the amount of time leisure centres spend on swimming lesson organisation and administration.

Tone, which currently operates sports and leisure facilities on behalf of local authorities and is one of the only leisure trusts nationwide to provide sports and health development services, teamed up with Somerset-based IT consultancy Cap2 Solutions to jointly develop the new CoursePro software, which is now ready to launch nationwide after successful regional trials.

CoursePro is a first-of-its-kind application that facilitates administration, course coordination and customer interaction, meaning that everything from organising lessons to updating the progress of each child and producing detailed reports is handled within the system. Swimming instructors feed up-to-the-minute data into the system via iPod Touches whilst poolside, eliminating the need for follow up paperwork and manual reporting.

CoursePro has been trialled at four of Tone's centres in the south west and findings show that 70 staff hours per week in total have been freed up across the four locations since the system was put in place. As well as its time saving benefits, CoursePro also allows centres to move on to a continuous assessment scheme meaning that children can start and finish courses at any point, progressing through the levels at their own pace rather than having to fit in around set timetables as is typically the case. This extra convenience has proved very popular with parents, leading to an extra 400 children enrolling across the four centres since the software trials began.

Parents can also log in remotely to check their child's progress and pay for new lessons online, eliminating long queues at the leisure centres.

"At Tone we're passionate about being industry innovators and it became clear that organising and administering swimming lessons was an area that could be improved vastly with some inventive thinking," said Joel Chapman, commercial director at Tone Leisure. "The key aim was to cut down on the number of hours swimming instructors have to spend registering attendance, ticking off levels, printing out reports and giving detailed feedback to hundreds of parents. This is all now done online, allowing swim schools to free up a significant number of extra hours of staff time, as well as attract greater numbers of participants with the continuous assessment scheme. It's exciting for us to formally launch this product on a national scale and we hope to capitalise on the excellent word of mouth interest we've generated during the testing period."

CoursePro is available nationally on an annual licence system, the cost of which depends on the number of participants in the swim school. The licence fee covers technical support and software updates.