What is the regional work?
NIACE staff have experience and expertise across the range of national and regional adult learning policy and practice, including specialist knowledge of literacy, language and numeracy.
Liz Kingdom and Simon Mauger, the South West Regional Programme Directors, work closely with strategic agencies, funding bodies, other regional and sub-regional organisations and local learning providers. They have extensive networks of contacts and hold regional data to generate high levels of stakeholder and user participation as well as support for research activity.
NIACE works with regional partners to coordinate Adult Learners' Week in the region and supports regional celebrations of learning.
The Regional Programme Directors:
- Advocate on behalf of adult learners and adult learning and strengthen the voice of the learner at regional, local and institutional levels
- Support adult learning providers and practitioners in the region
- Organise seminars, conferences and networks to promote and disseminate excellent practice across all aspects of adult learning
- Act as a source of current information on policies and practices
- Undertake research, development and consultancy
- Organise seminars, conferences and networks to promote and disseminate excellent practice across all aspects of adult learning
Age Demography
The UK's ageing population presents significant challenges, and nowhere is this more evident than in the South West. In many business sectors there is an ageing workforce and an increasingly large number of people will be spending a significant part of their lives ‘post-paid work'. If the South West is ineffective in its age management, it will lose out on the valuable human and social capital that older people can offer. NIACE works closely with the wide range of regional agencies and organisations addressing these issues. The NIACE Regional Programme Director is chair of the Regional Employment and Skills Partnership (SWRESP)'s Age Management Standing Group (AMSG), established in 2008 to support the SWRESP and its partners, to identify, monitor and advise on policies and actions that meet the skills, learning, labour market and active needs of older people and their employers. Over the past five years we have been instrumental in EQUAL and other projects that have informed the development of the AMSG and its work.
NIACE is working with Skills for Care on a major ESF Innovation project about culture change in the workplace; and with the SWRDA and AMSG partners we are leading foresight work on the future of age demography, work and active ageing to inform the region's Population Debate and the Single Regional Strategy. We collaborate with other regional work on age issues, in equalities and with the newly-formed regional Forum for Age. What we do on age demography is closely linked with our other regional work, as health and wellbeing, digital inclusion, and skills for life are significant factors in age management.
South West 
