Justice for Pensioners!
John Payne
Justice for Pensioners!
It didn’t feel like adult education.
This article was written as a reflection on my voluntary work with the Putney and Roehampton organisation of Pensioners. Together we produced a book 'Justice for pensioners!' (ISBN 0 9534665 0 7, 1998) which tells the story of this lively group in South-West London which campaigns for pensioners' rights. The article identifies much of the work of this organisation as important learning for pensioners, but which falls outside current definitions of 'educational work'. 'Important' here is used in the
Richard Johnson sense of 'really important knowledge'. The article does not carry publication details, because the book has sold out!
The Putney and Roehampton Organisation of Pensioners (PROP) was a voluntary body which I had worked with in the 1980s when I was Head of Centre at their local Adult Education Institute. I had carried out an oral history project with some of their number, helped them to produce leaflets after the closure of the GLC-funded Putney Resource Centre, done the odd bit of photocopying for them, nothing very much. I had behaved much as any community adult educator would have done. A good number of their members also came to the Adult Education Centre as ‘students’. It was a low key but important relationship in a part of London where older people tended to live quite local lives in rented accommodation, unlike the younger ones who tended to be either very transient or had bought into the private streets of ‘posh Putney’.
So when in 1996, Laurie Green (now the PROP Secretary) phoned me up and asked me if I’d like to write a history of the organisation, I agreed, but on one condition: I would write the book with them rather than for them. And this is what I have tried to do. There is considerable use of interview material and each draft was read and carefully commented on by the informal group which came to be known as ‘the Book Committee.’ Laurie himself wrote a Foreword, his daughter Stephanie wrote an Afterword on the theme of solidarity between the generations, there are poems, extracts from Minutes Books, Letters to the Editor and so on.
So Justice for Pensioners! was a nice community effort but scarcely adult education. However, as I worked through the large box of press cuttings, reports, leaflets and photos that constituted the raw material for the book, some of those insistent questions about the relationship between formal and informal adult learning began to surface. Here was an organisation, dedicated to improving the status of older people, which month after month (they meet on the first and third Monday of each month) had set out to enhance the knowledge and understanding of a sizeable group of people (50-60 is an average attendance) on subjects which direct effect pensioners: health issues; pension issues; care in the community; security; European, parliamentary and borough council elections. This knowledge was in turn being spread more widely by the regular reports of meetings prepared by Laurie Green and printed in the local paper, the Wandsworth Borough News. And the Really Important Knowledge they were gleaning from external speakers and their own discussions was giving rise to action – in particular, campaigns to bring home to other people the extent of poverty and hardship among older people, and the differential impact on older people of changes in social services and the Health Service.
Within the book, there is a rumbling critique from the older people themselves of some of the trends in our society which run in directions contrary to the liberating purposes of lifelong learning:
- A critique of formal school education. Laurie Green writes in the foreword: ‘Many people in their sixties and seventies had a poor education, interrupted by the war and often irrelevant or hostile to working-class values and ideas.’
- A critique of cuts in the learning opportunities available to older people through the local authority adult education service as centres closed, fees rose, concessions dwindled, and the range of opportunities available shrank.
- A critique of the notion of ‘authority’ in a society run by experts (doctors, social workers, politicians, civil servants, educators) who ‘know best’. Pensioners’ leader Jack Jones is quoted in the book as saying ‘Don’t tell us, ask us!’ The book is aimed not just at pensioners but at professionals who work with pensioners, politicians and opinion-formers.
Alongside criticism of the way things are, there is a cheerful optimism about the way things might be in the future. Here are people arriving in the later stages of their lives with an unquenchable optimism about the future. Not for them the deep pessimism of post-modernism and the ‘end of history’ but an assertion that the collective efforts of ordinary people can change things for the better. It is not a selfish or sectarian feeling, either, but a feeling that reaches out in solidarity across the generations and across barriers of gender, disability, ethnicity and nation.
The launch in Putney on 7 December 1998 was a good moment for personal reflection on what all this energy and activity meant, for it also marked an end to my direct involvement with London (having recently moved to live and work in my home county of Somerset). A number of speakers referred to the community work tradition from which PROP had emerged 15 years ago, and in particular the principle that the objective of social policy is to enable individuals and groups to both define and achieve their own objectives, their own solutions to the problems which face them in their daily lives. Yet there is a question of resources here. The range of community support mechanisms which existed in London in the mis-1980s – community workers, adult education workers, community artists - were an invaluable tool in helping to build strong and vibrant local communities which are (for me at least) the essential ‘other face’ of the processes of economic globalisation. I am by no means convinced that the National Lottery and Single Regeneration Budgets can guarantee the same kind of open-ended commitment to what people actually want for themselves and their communities.
For adult education workers, there is a question about whether the present identification of ‘lifelong learning’ with ‘economic prosperity’ is an adequate understanding of the term. I am also struck by the way that the ‘market’ notion of liberal adult education (if you want it, you pay for it) contrasts very badly with the curriculum development required if lifelong learning is to seem relevant and of value to a wider range of learners. I was very struck at the launch of Justice for Pensioners! by the presence of a significant minority of PROP members who had been involved directly in exciting adult education curriculum developments activities in the 1980s:
- Keep Fit and Healthy over 50 which sought to link exercise classes with the other things that older people need to know in order to keep healthy
- The importance of Basic Education throughout life, in particular Maths for older women
- Dressmaking / Oral History which tried to make much more explicit the many informal types of learning (about fashion, social change and why craft skills matter) which take place in traditional adult education craft classes.
Perhaps such development activities still go on, and it would be good to hear more about them in the pages of adult education journals. Informal and community-based adult education is not just of value because learners may progress to more work-orientated, accredited courses. Paid employment is, after all, a minority activity, compared with all the other kinds of work that go on in our society, especially domestic work, voluntary work and the organisation of a wide range of groups and clubs in ’civil society’. In a somewhat tongue-in-cheek fashion I referred to this as ‘social work’ in the first draft of a recent academic article[1], though the final published version used Michael Welton’s term ‘development work’[2]. Of course it is important that adult learning should underpin the economic activities on which national prosperity depends; but it is also important for adult learning to support the wider range of essential social and community activities. We need more public debate on this, and we need more articles in Adults Learning about what is actually going on at the interface of formal and informal adult learning.
John Payne
December 1998
John Payne is a NIACE Research Associate and a writer and researcher on lifelong learning. From 1999-2001 he is a 0.5 Senior Research Fellow in the School of Continuing Education at the University of Leeds. His most recent book Journey up the Thames: William Morris and Modern England will be published by Five Leaves Press in summer 2000. Correspondence is welcomed, especially on how as a society we can offer effective support and encouragement to community groups wishing to engage in informal adult education, without in some way incorporating, marginalising or otherwise messing with their chosen objectives or ways of working!
John’s e-mail address is , but he also enjoys postal correspondence to: Dr John Payne, Mortimer House, 9 Vallis Way, Frome, Somerset BA11 3BD.
John H PaynePage 101/28/2019
[1] Payne, J. (1996) Adult Education and 'the economic': paid work and 'development work' in the late modern world Scottish Journal of Adult and Continuing Education 3 (2), 67-80
[2] (ed) M. Welton (1995) In defence of the lifeworld: critical perspectives on lifelong learning, State University of New York Press, Albany