INTRODUCTION: The swimming instructor is the greatest barrier to protection against childhood drowning, and among their potential are: I- daily and systematic contact with guardians, reverberating knowledge to raise awareness of prevention mechanisms; II- teaching reactive skills (cognitive and motor) of action and prevention; III- conducting interventions such as practical and theoretical events - lectures, which favor the multiplication of information through awareness of other layers of the guardians' family members - uncles, grandparents, etc. However, it is the intervention program that guides the professional in empowering the learner at different swimming levels to acquire reactive drowning skills with progressive and specific degrees of complexity. OBJECTIVES: To investigate the effects of a program on learning reactive skills for the prevention of childhood drowning at five swimming levels; to detect the magnitudes of the program's effects at each swimming level; to analyze the frequency of domains in each of the five sub-skills at each level. METHODOLOGY: The results of 5,427 children were analyzed, including 1,016 babies_3; 2,001 at the adaptation level, 1,467 at the initiation level, 719 at the improvement_1 level, and 224 at the improvement_2 level, all participants for more than one year in a swimming program - Gustavo Borges Methodology, applied in 380 educational institutions in Brazil. Each swimming level consisted of five distinct reactive sub-skills related to drowning prevention, distributed in the pedagogical calendar with different practice frequencies managed according to the magnitudes of the learners' domains. The time interval between the pre- and post-condition was six months. In each of the levels, the following skills were determined: babies_3 Jumps and swimming with clothes; Adapted - Combined movements and swimming with clothes (5); Introductory - Aquatic Safety, activities with clothes (5); Impr_1 - Aquatic Self-Competence with clothes (5) and Impr_2 - Collective Aquatic Competence with clothes and socks (5). After confirming the normality of the data through the Shapiro-Wilks test, the Student's t-test for paired measures was chosen in the analysis of the program's effect on the investigated sub-skills. CONCLUSION: The results indicated that the intervention program proved efficient for the acquisition of reactive skills with varying degrees of complexity at different swimming levels, and the skills with inter-level complexity progression appear to have allowed for progressive and consistent domain development.
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