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Past Older & Bolder Projects

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Learning in Later Life Campaign 2001 – Celebrating Older Learners

The campaign attracted over 100 entries from a wide range of organisations planning all sorts of interesting celebrations. One event in each of the nine English regions was selected to receive an award to help offset the costs of the celebration.

The final evaluation report of the Celebrating Older Learners Campaign is now available to download from the link below.

Mature Workforce in the East Midlands Region 2006

The East Midland Development Agency (EMDA) has supported a mature workforce initiative - Experience Works! - in this region for some years. This has explored techniques to help older individuals to become more employable, streamlined guidance processes for individuals, and liaised with employers in key sectors to assess skills needs. We now wish to evaluate the progress made by Experience Works! over the last 6 years. We hope this will help us be more responsive to the needs of employers, the economy and older workers. To this end we should be most grateful if you could complete and return this short questionnaire.

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Learning in Fourth Age Settings

Department of Health project looking at learning in residential home settings.

Flanshaw Lodge report:
In 2002 NIACE funded ARTLINK West Yorkshire to plan, develop and deliver a multi-agency intervention in a care setting for up to 10 older people. The remit was the delivery of a multi-arts project to enhance the learning and quality of life of the 4th age residents, which could be sustainable after the immediate project had ended. It was proposed that ARTLINK involved care staff and the older people at Flanshaw Lodge, with planning and delivery and to co-ordinate with local agencies.

For more information and for the full results of the project you can download the following report:

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Mind your Language

Aim: To highlight the reliance by a significant number of older EU residents on non-European Languages.

Many older residents in the European Union (economic migrants, refugees or settlers from ex colonies) still rely on their native language for communication. Although efforts are being made to overcome this, these languages are not currently treated as ‘mainstream’ languages even though some have greater usage than some of the European languages and many of those reliant on their mother tongue can only speak it and not read it.

It is therefore essential to uncover the issues, which prevent their better inclusion in wider European society.

Over the last two years NIACE has been collecting the testimonies of older learners to the benefits of their later life learning experience. These benefits have been expressed in the form of perceptions of improved health, lessened depression, better engagement with family, and increased social contact. Several of these testimonies have come from older people from black and minority ethnic communities.

The collected ‘evidence’ has been used in several ways

2001 is European year of Languages. As part of its contribution NIACE is collecting the testimonies of older black and minority ethnic learners in their mother tongue. A tape will be made of around 12 of these testimonies and will be used to remind learning providers and policy makers of the exclusion faced by many older people who do not speak English. The tapes will be accompanied by a booklet of translations.

At a later state of the project, sound tapes in two or three languages will be used with older people from those communities to encourage involvement in some form of later life learning.

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Facilitating Older Learners

This project has evolved from a previous NLCB funded project called Opportunities for Older People. That initiative involved collaboration with three partners in three different areas of England to explore ways of widening participation for older people. The aim was to encourage older people to become self advocates in respect of determining their own learning needs. The current project seeks to ‘distil’ the previous project’s successful processes of planning, negotiation, consultation strategies and techniques to make them available to a wider audience in the form of a resource pack in order to:

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Feel Free Checklist/Aide-Memoire

Funded under DfES contract.

Older people are an increasing proportion of our population yet their presence is not equally reflected in adult education programmes, except those older people who have always been adult learners. Society is beginning to realise that adult education is a useful tool to assist older people develop a worthwhile role and a sense of involvement and fulfilment in their later life. In an effort to increase educational opportunities for new client groups of older people, NIACE is developing a checklist cum aide-memoire to assist practitioners and planners.

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It doesn't add up

A pilot study in Havering conducted for NIACE among people over the age of 50 discovered that almost 30% experienced some or extreme difficulty understanding their finances; 31% with some or extreme difficulty with banking; 38% have problems with credits cards. Other difficulties include shopping (26%) and gas bills (29%). Whilst this was a small scale, very local, survey it did raise issues that could be pursued in other more structured surveys.

Not only are these issues relevant today in terms of the knowledge we have of how people live their financial lives, but the pattern of life is moving towards more personal control of finances and pensions. This greater reliance on the individual increases the need to examine the levels of financial literacy, and how lack of these skills impinges on decision making and the knock-on effect on standard of living. It has also become clearer that older people need help to increase their skills in financial literacy if they are to maintain their dignity and independence in old age.

Aims

The programme will build on the work started in Havering and work with the following organisations: Coventry Community Education Service, Leicester West Indian Senior Citizens Project, and the Senior Studies Institute at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow.

The project will create focus groups of older people to:

The findings and deliberations of the groups will be recorded and shared among the three groups. The groups will undertake their own analysis with the support and assistance of an advisory group, and benefit from the comments of the other groups.

A second phase of the work will be to develop guidance materials on financial literacy. This would involve working with people with expertise in basic skills, advice and guidance and older people in the chosen areas to develop and test appropriate guidance materials. These materials will be written with and for financial institutions, but tested with older people.

The third phase, working with older people as partners, will be to produce a report for the financial sector with recommendations.

A briefing sheet on work in this area will be produced later this year - if you know of any other initiatives on financial literacy or have any ideas or comments you wish to share, please send them to me.

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