SCHOOL PROGRAMME

ABOUT OUR SCHOOL PROGRAMME

What: Brings older and younger people together to learn and have fun, sharing the untapped skills, knowledge and experience of life older people have to offer, so they support and inspire each other.

Where: In schools, secondary and primary in their neighbourhood.

Why: Two sections of our local communities are being increasingly challenged:

• Schools are expected to continuously improve the education experience, and achieve better numeracy and literacy results, despite increasing class sizes and constrained budgets.
• Older people are living longer, often without close family nearby, and the social care budget is growing larger and larger. They represent an untapped resource or skills and knowledge for schools.

These two groups are often competing for scarcer resources in order to meet these challenges. Our school programme provides a local approach for these two groups to work together. It successfully contributes to providing solutions to reduce the stress on school and social care resources and enhance the lives of the teaching staff, pupils and older people.

Together we contribute to reducing

• Underperformance & low aspirations of pupils
• Loneliness and isolation of older people
• Lack of flexible part-time jobs for retired people
• Lack of local opportunities for the two groups to collaborate
• Hostile intergenerational stereotypes