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Ian Searle Chairman The Third Age Trust See his newsletter below: |
An April 2010 update from from Ian Searle - Chairman, Third Age Trust All the officers of the Trust are volunteers and all work equally hard. As Vice Chairman from September 2006 to 2009 I was heavily committed, as my last year’s contribution to the website indicated. By May last year I had been particularly heavily involved with tutoring an online course, with overseeing all the educational services of the Trust within the Standing Committee for Education, which I chaired, and with the writing of Time to Learn. Now read on… Time to Learn was extremely well received, not only by U3A members but by many outside agencies, including the Government Department of Business Innovations and Skills and the National Institute for Adult and Continuing Education. Professor Keith Percy of Lancaster University wrote, “This publication is to be commended. It deserves a wider audience then the members of U3A. It could usefully be placed on the reading lists of all training courses for adult educators. It raises, sometimes inadvertently curriculum issues which need to be debated; it challenges the professionals; it gives great hope for the development of non-formal adult learning.” We should not be surprised that in the course of the past twelve months we have run out of copies, although the first print run was of 5000. The Department of Business Innovations and Skills, which took over from the DIUS, now commissioned NIACE to follow up Time to Learn with another project aimed at anyone, not merely U3A group leaders, but anyone at all who needed information on how to set up and run an informal adult learning group. This time it was the NIACE staff who were to do the work, though I was asked to be the only non-NIACE member of the supervisory committee. That work has now been virtually completed in the form of a website which you can find if you go to www.selforganisedlearning.com It has necessitated my making several trips to Leicester and I have one more such trip to make yet. One other website you should take a look at, too, is to be found at schoolofeverything, which you can soon find by Googling for it. This work grew out of the government initiative leading to the White Paper about Informal Adult Learning and called The Learning Revolution. The Trust’s involvement with all this has been demanding of time and effort but has led to our making a lot of interesting contacts, all of whom are interested in informal learning and most of them also concerned in the wellbeing of older people. The Edinburgh Conference before the AGM was absolutely brilliant with four eminent professors talking about wellbeing, about health, about learning and about the latest research in all these areas. In the past few weeks, in my capacity as Chairman of the Third Age Trust, I have also been privileged to introduce to large U3A audiences in London first the annual Dana Lectures, this time on the ethics of neuroscience and medicine ( is it ethical to give cognitive enhancement drugs to children to offset attention deficit disorder?) and three superb lectures at our annual day at the Royal Institution. These included researchers in Astrobiology (the search for extraterrestrial life), in magnets and their applications in medicine, and in nutrition and obesity. Other, similar duties as Chairman have led me to take part in several major conferences at which I represented the Trust. These were also associated with learning and with health and wellbeing and I find myself these days on speaking terms with representatives of such national organisations as WEA, NIACE, the Museums Libraries and Archives, various government departments, Local Government Association and many more. I’ve found myself in some unusual venues such as the Barbican, the old Covent Garden, large hotels, the Friends Meeting House in Euston Road, the British Library, and most frequently the National Union of Journalists’ headquarters in Grays Inn Road. The NUJ, in fact, is where I go every two months to chair the NEC meetings. There are currently twelve elected Regional Trustees plus four Officers including myself. Four other people are ‘in attendance’ so the full board meeting normally consists of at least twenty people and demands my full attention from 11 am until about 4.30 pm, though we are now planning to make each meeting take place over two consecutive days. The planning for these meetings takes some time as does the follow up work as you can well imagine. Don’t imagine, though, that I simply come home and station myself at my computer and telephone for seven of the eight weeks between meetings, except for the time spent at the conferences I have just described. Far from it, I am constantly trying to fit in visits to Regions and Networks who ask for me and/or other officers to address them. In the past three months or so I have visited Newcastle upon Tyne, Preston in Lancashire, Abingdon in Oxfordshire, Lewes in Sussex, the Greater London Forum, Sheffield, Crowthorne (near Sandhurst. In fact it was Wellington College). I have more visits still in the pipeline for the next couple of months including a return to the Thames Valley Network and to East Sussex as well as Birmingham. Since I live so far out in the West, each of these visits involves at least one night away from home and most entail many hours on uncomfortable train journeys – even the regular London trips take five hours each way. None of this would be possible without the support of my long-suffering wife who drives me to the station and gets on with her life without me for much of the time. All the same we shall probably both be quite content to see the end of this period of service: I can only stand as Chairman for three years and I should be invited to stay on for one year after that. We are actually going through a very complicated period of change in the U3A, characterised by the astonishing and continuing speed at which the movement is growing. Carrick is typical of the whole country in this. Five years ago we reached 500 U3As in the UK; this week the number reached 760! For some time I have been talking of a total membership in the UK of about 225000 members; this week we reached 239000. We can hardly keep up with the expansion and the demands on our support services grow accordingly as new U3As look for advice and older ones seek help to refresh themselves and ask how they can find new committee members. We are about to engage in a thorough consultation exercise to make sure the services we provide are those most U3A committees want. When I first joined the NEC six years or so ago, the U3A News was posted to about 120000 people in bulk and cost the Trust about 13p per copy to produce; now we have a print run of nearer 170000 copies and the advertising revenue is such that the actual magazine pays for itself and we now ‘only’ pay for the postage. We also now send everyone on direct mailing lists free copies of ‘Sources’ which have been accepted and read with great enthusiasm in the main. To achieve everything we need to do we are constantly in need of more man (and woman) power, mostly volunteers, but also a handful of employees. As Chairman I must be fully conversant with everything that is happening within the Trust itself, and I try also to keep up with happenings in the U3As which are our members. I must just conclude this rambling account by telling you of a recent visit which I paid by invitation to Sheffield. Their Chairman invited me to spend a day there, meeting their Group Leaders in the morning and to chat with the Committee in the afternoon. After a night in the Travelodge, I was picked up and driven to the venue for the Group Leaders’ meeting. Now Sheffield is the biggest U3A in the UK with 2700 members so it wasn’t too surprising that the meeting was held in a large hotel. However, I was surprised to find the Group Leaders were all going to sit at a number of beautifully set tables and that there would be 160 of them present. They have 175 groups. In the past six months fifteen Leaders decided they’d had enough and stood down; they were instantly replaced by fifteen other volunteers. During the same six months a further ten new groups had also started, two of which were for Mandarin Chinese and Sanskrit. They have 31 walking groups! After a buffet lunch the committee of about twelve members asked me to chat informally about the way ahead as I saw it. They were enthusiastic and so welcoming I left feeling all warm and fuzzy. That,
to be honest, is true of just about all the groups of people I have met
in the U3A. It is a wonderful movement, in spite of its problems and the
occasional awkward member who questions everything and offers nothing in
return. What is more, it has gained many friends ‘on the outside’ in
government, in local government, in educational circles and in all those
concerned with the learning and welfare we provide for our members.
It’s worth all the time and effort it demands. Ian Searle April 2010
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