As part of its "Learning Revolution" plan for informal adult learning, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills asked NIACE to write guidance materials for managers of care homes about the impact learning is having--in the care homes that provide activities--on the residents and the staff. It became clear in the course of the…

This paper explores the relations between older people, poverty and place in rural Britain. It develops previous work on rural poverty that has pointed both to the significance of older people within the rural poor population and to their denials of poverty. The paper also connects with recent discussions on the complexity of relations between…

The common practice of annually age grouping children in education, likely done under the assumption of similarly aged children sharing similar abilities and learner characteristics, may actually undermine equity and fairness in student assessments. This strategy has received criticism for (dis) advantaging those older children born closer to the…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore learning for and through retirement from the workplace. Design/methodology/approach: First, "retirement" is considered in the light of the existing literature, demonstrating a complex concept. The paper describes the research project from which a theme of retirement as a learning process…

Old age is associated with poorer movement skill, as indexed by reduced speed and accuracy. Nevertheless, reductions in speed and accuracy can also reflect compensation as well as deficit. We used a manual tracing and a driving task to identify generalized spatial and temporal compensations and deficits associated with old age. In Experiment 1,…

Generational conflict is back. After years of relative silence, and mutual ignorance, the young and old are once more at war. With youth unemployment high on the political agenda, the fortunes of the "jobless generation" are being contrasted with those of the "golden generation" of baby boomers, but is one generation really…

Objective: We review all available controlled outcome studies of solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT) to evaluate evidence of its effectiveness. Method: Forty-three studies were located and key data abstracted on problem, setting, SFBT intervention, design characteristics, and outcomes. Results: Thirty-two (74%) of the studies reported…

The use of images of older people in the British advertising media has been under-researched to date. Further, previous research in any country has tended to examine such images from an "a priori" framework of general impressions and stereotypes of older people. This study addresses these issues with British consumers' (n = 106)…

A new project called Bookbite, which was launched in February 2010 by the national reading charity Booktrust, aims to encourage people over 60 to engage more with reading and writing for pleasure, and provides a range of web and paper-based resources to get them started. In this article, the author accounts his visit to the project and how he met…

A compelling body of research demonstrates that music continues to offer powerful potential for enhancing health and well-being in old age. Active music-making has been found to provide a source of enhanced social cohesion, enjoyment, personal development, and empowerment, and to contribute to recovery from depression and maintenance of personal…

There is now an accepted need for initiatives that support older people's health and well-being. There is increasing evidence that active engagement with music has the potential to contribute to this. This research aimed to explore the characteristics of older people who participated in active music making with a view to identifying the groups…

The key message of NIACE's 2011 survey of adult participation in learning is that recession is bad for lifelong learning for anyone over the age of 25. The survey highlights the central importance of workplaces as sites of adult learning--and the challenges posed to a learning society when opportunities to learn reduce. It shows that the gap…

Educating and training the dementia workforce is a global challenge, given the expected increasing number of people living with dementia across the world as the population ages. Two projects from the UK (one regionally and one locality based) investigated courses available to the workforce and mapped the content of identified courses against a…

Problem Statement: The island of Cyprus, due to its strategic location, was under the influence of many conquerors throughout the centuries. Cultural traces of these captors have survived to the present day. This long, turbulent history has had a profound effect on the Cypriot educational system, with the most recent influence being the impact of…

Lancaster University's Department of Continuing Education has a long tradition of engagement with older learners. Its latest innovation aims to reach out to older people sometimes suspicious of the "university on the hill". This article discusses how Lancaster University develops a "Senior Learner' Programme", which is…