“The NPC General Secretary, Jan Shortt, has written to Oliver Dowden Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, Jo Stevens Shadow Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport and Caroline Dinenage, Minister for Digital and Culture about digital inclusion / exclusion.”
You can read and download the letter on –
https://www.npcuk.org/post/digital-inclusion-and-exclusion
Dr John Miles
Older learners don’t feature much in the recent report from the Centenary Commission on Adult Education. (1) Moreover, it’s unlikely that the report’s strategic recommendations will attract much government support – despite a reference to the ‘civic’ responsibility of universities and colleges in the Conservative manifesto. So where should we direct our attention?
Focus 3 of the Commission’s report – ‘fostering community, democracy and dialogue’ – includes a recommendation for a locally administered ‘Community Learning Account’ of £50 million. Even if no funds are made available this Focus reflects an important strand of debate during the Commission’s year of operation. There have been a number of initiatives to widen the scope of democracy in recent years, in some of which older citizens (like Eileen Conn at Peckham Vision) are playing a prominent role. So far the work being developed around social isolation and ageing in boroughs like Camden or the Greater Manchester region has not crossed over into this wider sphere but there seems no reason why it should not. An excellent chapter by Marion Barnes, ‘Old Age and Caring Democracy’, in a new book on government provides us with a useful template here. (2) And as we learned at the Ransackers’ AGM some academics are looking beyond the participation of older people in their research to joint-working which can accomplish socially useful goals determined with older people at community level.
What the Commission wants to see is community education and further education – supported by universities – playing a fuller part in community development. From the older citizens’ perspective community education could involve a wide range of issues: from an age-friendly environment, collaborating to make social care socially cohesive and blending the analogue and the digital to the knowledge, skills and confidence needed to engage with bureaucratic and planning authorities of all kinds. I made a couple of suggestions along these lines in my submission to the Commission. For example, to support proposals for local citizen assemblies, I suggested basing them within further education colleges, both to develop relevant training {for all ages) and to engage younger adults more effectively – an intergenerational strategy which older people should support. Then at the recent Special Interest Group for Educational Gerontology event in Nottingham (attended by older activists from Long Eaton who provide It Help locally) I proposed that Older Peoples Forums might provide a good recruiting ground for citizenship education courses. Lastly, and most ambitiously, I’ve fantasised a life-course approach developing in slow motion. Children in primary schools spend a good deal of time now working in teams, nominating representatives to school council, discussing climate change and so-on. We need a structure where today’s ten year-olds are enabled to stay in touch with such structures throughout their lives – from secondary school, higher education, working and later life – establishing a cross-community inter-disciplinary framework in an unstable and dangerous world. Let’s start now.
(1) Commision Report
(2) Marion Barnes, (2019) ‘Old Age and Caring Democracy’ in, Henry Tam (ed), Whose Government is it? – The Renewal of State-Citizen Cooperation
We have a fashion problem. No, I don’t just mean that older women often struggle to find clothes they like/can wear/can afford on the high street. Professor Julia Twigg has written about this – how older women ‘have long been subject to social pressure to tone down, to adopt self-effacing, covered-up styles’, although she says to some extent this might be changing. To me the bigger picture is that the fashion industry is one of the biggest polluters in the world (Lindsay Brown, 2019), using massive quantities of water and producing waste. Did you know that when people return clothes bought online on a ‘try before you buy’ basis, it is common for the returned clothing to end up in landfill? (Harriet Constable,BBC). The drive towards cheaper and cheaper clothes – some worn just once or twice – also means that poorly paid garment workers in low income countries work for long hours in unsafe conditions.
However, many younger people are becoming more active in fighting climate change and recognising that everybody’s well-being is ‘corrupted and compromised by the political and economic systems that promote and support our modern, consumer-focussed lifestyles’ (Extinction Rebellion) I argue that working for change in the way we produce and use clothing is one area where older generations can contribute to thinking differently about what we are doing.
I remember wartime and post-WW2 austerity and make-do-and-mend. Fabrics were in short supply so people had to be inventive: wedding dresses made out of curtains, socks for the troops hand-knitted, clothes and shoes repaired and passed along until they could not be repaired any more. The expectation was for things to last and be cherished, not thrown out after a few wears because ‘fashion’ changed.
So it is encouraging that there has been a move by some young people to shake things up a bit by making businesses that re-use clothes instead of letting them be thrown away (Sarah Butler, 2018, The Guardian). I believe that those of us who are old enough to remember how to improvise, how to alter and adapt clothing, and how to repair and mend, have a lot to offer younger people by sharing these skills. It will be a small contribution to cutting down on the waste of energy and water, but a big contribution to intergenerational understanding and changing how we all think about the clothes that we wear.
Teresa Lefort in conversation with Caroline Holland
Please feedback on this topic. All contributions to the debate gratefully received.
Adult education is in crisis: decades of cuts in funding has led to a decline in courses offered for adult learners and around 1.8 million adults per year are not able to access courses to improve their skills (David Hughes, TES, September 2018).
But, unfortunately, the common discourse around adult education is linked to skills for employability and boosting the economy: what about education for the sake of education? Until 2017, I was the head of the Department for International Labour and Trade Union Studies (ILTUS) at Ruskin College, Oxford, an institution founded on the values of education as emancipation for the working class. We actively encouraged adults to study on a wide range of programmes that could, of course, help them to progress in their careers, but, more importantly, to develop critical thinking that can bring about social change. My oldest student was a man in his 80’s, who had been a success in business but never had the opportunity to study a higher education course. He wasn’t there to improve his chances of getting a better job or promotion in the workplace: he was there to read, listen, think, discuss and debate with the other students (and staff, which was encouraged!)
With the obsession with education and employability, educators find themselves in a situation where everything has to be linked to the chance of the student getting a job at the end: from lesson plans to OFSTED (the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills, which inspects institutions with students up to the age of 18), and organisations such as Advance HE, teaching has become more about ‘social mobility’ through employment than challenging the status quo. Are we there to produce yet another generation of automatons, who accept low paid, low valued work, zero- hour contracts, when they should be challenging the whole concept of the way work is constructed?
There is a light at the end of the tunnel (well, I think so!): The Cooperative University Project. As a founder member of a new educational worker cooperative, the RED Learning Coop: Research, Education and Development for Social Change, I was thrilled for us to be invited to be part of the development of this exciting initiative. In 2012, the Cooperative College in Manchester, started to explore ideas about ‘doing education differently’ and the 2017 Higher Education Act gave the space for alternative providers. So, what is different about a Cooperative University? Well, the vision for a start:
‘Our vision is to develop a new type of university based on social justice and co-operative values and principles which works for the mutual benefit of all.
A Co-operative University will empower students, enhancing their skills to develop new ways of thinking, working, researching and learning for life’ (Cooperative College website, April 2019).
The University is founded on Cooperative Values and Principles:
(Cooperative College Website, April 2019).
The first course starts in September 2019, so watch this space!
Tracy Walsh
Founder Member of The RED Learning Cooperative: Research, Education and Development.
Workshop: Thursday, May 30th 2019, 11.00 to 1600
Location: Futurelearn, 1-11 Hawley Crescent, Camden Town, London NW1 8NP run by AEA (Association for Education and Ageing)
Ransackers supports this workshop and invites any later life learners who can get to North London to attend.
The Workshop will be discussing the issues, and then putting together a response, to the Adult Education Commission’s Call for ideas and evidence on the way forward for Adult Education in the UK in the future*. The Call comes on the occasion of the centenary of the post WWW1 Ministry of Reconstruction’s hugely important Report to Government, which established the principles of adult education provision in the UK up to the 1990s.
This Workshop will focus on the education and learning of older people in the UK in the next decades and collect together views and arguments that will be forwarded to the Commission after the workshop. A central issue will be the role of the State.
The format on May 30 will be a pre-workshop collection of responses to the introductory document, introductory short inputs, small group working sessions and concluding debate.
All welcome. Free attendance
*See https://www.wea.org.uk/get-involved/our-campaigns/adult-education-100
How many of you have had negative experiences in high street phone shops while trying to buy new phones or other equipment?
Ransackers Association has had many discussions in recent years over this issue. We are all about later life learning and education: part of this is access to information and use of the web.
The throwaway society is with us and IT and communications devices wear out or start malfunctioning after 4-6 years. This is very annoying for some older people, who often try to buy things to last, and who object to replacing their kit so often. Without working phones, tablets and pcs people can get excluded from so much information and ways of communicating.
Continue reading “Ransackers gets involved in Innovations for Ageing: digital exclusion”
Ransackers Association 