The initiative, which aims to help young people excel in sport (their main career goal), while continuing with their education, celebrated the achievements of its first aquatic students to graduate from the programme.

The graduation ceremony, held at the Nottingham Belfry, honoured names from swimming, diving, synchronised swimming and water polo who completed the AASE programme in 2008, including synchronised swimmers Jenna Randall and Olivia Allison, who finished in 14th place overall in the duet event at the Beijing Olympics but could not attend the graduation due to training commitments.

The event, hosted by Athens 2004 Olympic Bronze Medallist, Steve Parry, also announced the five winners of the "Advanced Apprentice of the Year" awards, one for each discipline; swimming, diving, water polo, disability swimming and synchronized swimming.

The Advanced Apprentice of the Year for disability swimming was won by Portsmouth's Shane Scullian, upon receiving the award he said: "I wasn't expecting to win at all. I'm going to continue training as normal and use this as motivation to do even better in the future."

Olympian Jenna Randall from Rushmoor was awarded the synchronised swimming "Advanced Apprentice of the Year Award' over her duet partner Olivia Allison.

Randall said: "This means so much to me, I just want to thank everyone at British Scynchro that has helped me achieve everything in the past few years."

Adlington was interviewed by Parry as part of the ceremony and spoke about the resurgence of Britain’s female swimmers.

Adlington said: "My apprenticeship with the ASA provided me with high quality training, whilst giving me the opportunity to gain qualifications at the same time.

"Winning two gold medals in Beijing and breaking a world record was the greatest achievement of my life and hopefully we'll see many of the graduating and new AASE students competing for Great Britain over the next few years."

ASA Programme Manager Michelle Kiff said: "The AASE Programme is the first time athletes can get rewarded for the skills they have developed during their sporting career, it is a programme that supports them in education and in the pool.

"The athletes who have graduated are our first athletes to complete the programme and it has been an exciting past two years.

"As the programme has grown, these athletes have developed their own skills but also contributed to the development of the AASE programme as a talent pathway for new athletes joining the programme"