Older people's education 'neglected'

Vast majority of education budget spent on under 25s, despite growing elderly population, says new report

• Peter Kingston
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 20 January 2009 10.24 GMT
• Article history

Older people must be given more chances to learn if they are to contribute to society rather than be a financial burden, according to a new study on population published today.

The current approach which concentrates on younger people and on skills for employment is inadequate to meet the challenges of demographic change, it says. Only 1% of the education budget is currently spent on the oldest third of the population.

The challenges include the fact that most people can expect to spend a third of their lives in retirement, that there are now more people over 59 than under 16 and that 11.3 million people are over state pension age. Life expectancy for a 65-year-old is now 85 for men and 88 for women.

"Learning needs to continue throughout life. Our historic concentration of policy attention and resources on young people cannot meet the new needs," says the report's author, Professor Stephen McNair.

"The vast majority of our education budget is spent on people below the age of 25. When people are changing their jobs, homes, partners and lifestyles more often than ever, they need opportunities to learn at every age."

For example, some people are starting new careers in their 50s and later, says the report, which was commissioned by the Independent Inquiry into the Future of Lifelong Learning (IfLL), sponsored by the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education.

People need opportunities to make a "midlife review" to adjust to the later stages of employed life, and to plan for the transition to retirement, which may now happen unpredictably at any point from 50 to over 90, says McNair, a member of the IfLL secretariat.

And there should be more money available to support people in establishing a sense of identity and finding constructive roles for the "third age", the 20 or more years they will spend in healthy retired life.

The same goes for the expanding "fourth age" when people need to maintain identity, health, social engagement and wellbeing during the final stages of life, says McNair.

He also believes that in an era of greater mobility there should be more help for people to establish themselves in new relationships and places.

McNair warns that with the downturn in the economy affecting the value of all types of pensioners, people need to continue learning. Some need to maintain skills to earn and support dependents. Others can do voluntary work more effectively if they can retain and update their skills and knowledge.

"Although everyone's quality of life depends on the economic productivity of 'working age' adults, it does not follow that the maximum good of the population as a whole is served by focusing everything on paid employment and young people," says the report.

"Even if it is right for the bulk of public funding to be spent in this way, government needs to consider how the other kinds of learning need are to be met, and to ask whether 1% of the public education budget is a proper share to tackle the learning needs of a third of the population."