colours and shapes around the top of it and then put a flower in it – I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it … getting my hands dirty, feeling like a child again, and I love flowers. It’s a bit like going to the seaside with my spade and bucket.
‘It takes me back years to when I was a child, my parents always loved gardening and there was three girls and all of us had to take it in turns to go out and plant and do things in the garden. I loved it, I still love it – getting my hands dirty, it’s as simple as that. ‘I usually throw myself into everything I do – I think we all do. We all do this [learning], then you get up and think [shrugs] “oh, I’ve got to go back to my room and be alone, it’s time to have a cup of tea and do a puzzle”. This [learning] is real life, a jigsaw puzzle is not.’
‘Real life’ for the residents of Tansley House means, according to Beverley, that ‘they talk more to their families, they’re more alert. A good 80 per cent of them go out now on a regular daily basis whereas before nobody ventured through the door. We get more visitors, more children – we do a lot of intergenerational work with the local school.
‘It’s amazing now that children are coming into the building, whereas before it was a place where children didn’t go. And they get so much out of it just having visitors, people to take them out, things to do – there’s no sleeping in the day, they’re all alert and then they go to bed at night and sleep. ‘We’ve found that the residents interact a lot better when they’re part of a group and it gives them something to talk about. When they are in these activities their sleeping patterns are a lot better, they’re not falling asleep in the chairs during the day – they’ve got an insight into a better life. It makes them individuals. They can decide what they want to do. Before, there was absolutely nothing out there.’
But what really makes this such a win-win situation are the extraordinary multiple benefits the learning is having on the business. Morale is extremely high amongst the workforce and there are huge savings, as Beverley explains: ‘We spend a big part of our life at work, so to come to work and be able to have fun and do your job, and get paid for it as well, it’s a bonus. We have a very small turnover of staff, we’ve got a lot of staff
who’ve been here 10 years, some more, and I think that it’s helped over the last four or five years.
‘If they [other care homes] opened it up [learning] for just once, twice a week, they’d see the changes. Chair-based exercises have had a massive effect on the well-being of the residents. They have reduced the incontinence materials that we have to order in by three-quarters and it’s all down to the exercises. The sleeping tablets, the anti- depressants, have dropped considerably, and it is just purely down to what we do in the day to keep them motivated. There’s less risk of falls to what we had before.
‘Life was very institutionalised [here] and that’s what we wanted to change, to change the way these people lived, to bring them out into society. It’s just fabulous how it works. I don’t think anybody would believe how well it does work until they’ve tried it.’ .
Ed Melia is NIACE’s Head of Media. To view NIACE’s film capturing the voices of older people in care settings talking about their learning go to:
http://www.niace.org.uk/sites/ default/files/IALCare.wmv
APRIL 2010 ADULTS LEARNING 25
Photo: Ed Melia
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32