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Silver learnersThe
Guardian, March 25, 2003
According to
recent research by Niace, the national adult education organisation, only
about a quarter of all grown-up people are currently in any sort of
education. If that strikes you as low,
bear in mind that there is one social group whose participation in
education is worse than half that rate; only one in nine in this group is
learning. However, it is significant that
when the individuals in this latter group do choose to study, they make
interesting subject choices: they are the people more likely to be
studying modern languages than other groups of learners, and no other
group is more interested in learning how to use computers. Among their top arts course
choices are film, photography and video. What is more, in 18 years' time,
in 2021, this group will constitute 40% of the UK population - 20 million
people. You will have guessed, no
doubt, who they are. They are "older learners", the over-55s.
Older learners are the neglected cohort in the equal opportunities and
social inclusion debates. Certainly a few colleges have well-established
programmes for older learners, but when it comes to the political agenda
older learners are way down the pecking order of excluded groups. Perhaps this is understandable.
Politicians rate their education policy and investment options in terms of
the balance of economic, political and social returns forecast for them by
their officials. Resources invested in policies will generally be expected
to yield economic and political benefits - social impact alone or
individual personal development will not cut the mustard. Investing in
good vocational education for 14- to 19-year-olds, for example, is aimed
at bringing substantial and long-term returns through improvements to the
skills stock of the economy, reductions in the unemployment benefits bill,
greater tax revenue, improvements in the crime statistics, and savings on
social services costs. Taken together these represent substantial
economic, political and social benefits. My hunch is that politicians
think that though the individual benefits of promoting learning for older
people may be considerable, the economic and political returns are
relatively small when compared with investing in people with long working
lives ahead of them. Nevertheless I suspect
politicians, for whatever reasons, underestimate the returns on improving
the participation of older people. They are far from negligible, and as
that cohort of the population expands, numerically and relatively due to
earlier baby booms and improved longevity, so the returns on investing in
them will increase. There are two good reasons why
ministers would be well advised to pay more than lip service to the needs
of older learners. In the first place, about one-third of unemployed
people over the age of 50 would like to be in work. Finding work benefits
not only those individuals, but also transforms them into net contributors
to the economy. New Deal 50plus is targeted at these individuals but many
people do not meet the recruitment criteria and the training element is
weak. And yet people in this age
group looking for a job often need to reskill or update their skills,
particularly where, as is often the case, their joblessness is due to the
decline of a traditional sector. The second reason it is
misguided of politicians to neglect older learners is that there is a good
deal of evidence that learning in later life is positively correlated with
healthy, active, independent ageing. People in their 50s and 60s enjoy
better health and activity levels than earlier generations due to higher
living standards and improvements in healthcare provision. That said, the
last years of our longer lives are too often characterised by poor health
and dependency. There is now a good deal of evidence that continuing to
learn in later years is positively correlated with better health, both
physical and mental. In particular, continued use of
one's cognitive functions seems to protect against losing them. The
"use it or lose it" adage applies to the mind, too.
Self-evidently, continued good health and independence is beneficial to
the individual, but it also reduces the cost to health and social services
of caring for unhealthy or dependent people. And when the proportion of
older people in the population is growing as fast it is in the UK, those
reductions add up to very significant savings. Nadine Cartner is head of policy for the Association for College Management. Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging |
