At the 2009 annual conference of the British Society of Gerontology, the Alan Walker Prize was awarded to Tessa Harding MBE for her significant and lasting contribution to British Social Gerontology. More about the award and Tessa Harding’s contribution can be found at the University of the West of England’s press release. Below Tessa Harding writes about the project that she was particularly honoured for with the Alan Walker prize.

Tessa Harding MBE

I was very gratified to be awarded the Alan Walker prize by the British Society of Gerontology at this year’s conference. With Alan himself as the first recipient and Sally Greengross as the second, I clearly have some very impressive footprints to fill.

I was particularly pleased that the focus of the award was the Speaking Up for Our Age programme, run by Help the Aged for the last ten years. It is unusual for long, slow community development projects to gain such prestigious recognition: such projects are by their very nature unspectacular, working away at grass roots level, slowly building confidence and gaining substance and significance. It is rare for them to have the spotlight shone upon them in this way.

Speaking Up for Our Age (SUFOA) sprang from a very simple conviction: that older people had an absolute right to be involved in matters that concerned their lives. They were well able to make judgments about their own priorities and about the changes they wanted to see in the world around them and those judgments were often different from those made by statutory bodies and policy makers in their name. Furthermore, their testimony was especially powerful, because it was based on first hand experience. Ten years ago, this was revolutionary stuff. In the mid to late 1990s, older people were very rarely involved in developing policy on matters that concerned them directly. They had very little say in how services were developed or what research was needed or how it was conducted. Nobody was listening to them, and the mechanisms that might enable older people to participate were poorly developed and little understood.

The small number of autonomous Older People’s or Senior Citizens’ Forums that already existed at that time offered a way for older people to make their voices heard on their own terms. They offered a sound democratic model, but were few and far between. Speaking Up for Our Age was developed as a programme of support, aiming to support the creation of Forums across the country. It advised on setting up a Forum, and offered small grants to help with the administrative and transport costs associated with running it. It offered regular policy support, particularly information about national policy developments, so that Forum members were well informed and confident. And it offered opportunities for Forums to get together at regional and national level, so that a real sense of being part of a wider movement grew. An independent newsletter with its own editorial board, Forum to Forum, was launched and is still going strong some seven years later. Training sessions were offered, on handling the media, supporting the membership, engaging hard to reach groups, negotiating with the local authority and other pressing topics.

Crucially there were ‘no strings’ attached. The object of SUFOA was to support Forums as an end in itself. What Forums chose to campaign on and how they chose to work was up to them.

The SUFOA programme grew in strength with funding from the Community Fund and from Help the Aged. Fieldworkers and Regional Development Officers from Help the Aged invested substantial time and energy into supporting Forums, and local authorities and Age Concern groups came on board as partners. Many thousands of older people across the country seized the opportunity to make their voices heard and worked tirelessly to engage others and make Forums as representative and effective as possible.

SUFOA has grown steadily ever since. The forum model proved resilient, not least because it was flexible and enabled forums to evolve in their own way. Some were large, sometimes with many thousands of members, while others were small. Some were predominantly campaigning groups while others had a mix of social and campaigning objectives. Over the years, forums have undertaken research, held demonstrations, lobbied their local councils, collaborated in policy development, involved isolated people and minority communities, and changed services across the country. They have often challenged received wisdoms and inherent ageism. They have tackled some difficult issues and scored many notable successes.

A second challenge was then to create opportunities for older people to become directly involved in shaping policy and practice. How could that best be done in ways that were meaningful and realistic and which brought results?

A great opportunity arose when I was asked in 1999 by the Department of Health to convene a group of older people to contribute to the National Service Framework for older people. Drawing together people from Forums across the country, and trying to ensure a diversity of representation, we met several times as a group to thrash out our own priorities for the NHS and social care. (The result was eventually published in 2000 by Help the Aged as ‘Our future health: older people’s priorities for health and social care’, which still reads like a very credible manifesto.) In the meantime, the group put its views strongly to Dr Ian Philp, who was leading the work on the Framework for the Department of Health. The group was listened to seriously and respectfully and when the National Service Framework was published it was clear that at least three of the eight standards laid down sprang directly from the group’s own priorities. The first standard was to root out ageism and age discrimination from the NHS, an objective we are still far from achieving today. Other standards, on autonomy and personal dignity, and on helping people stay healthy rather than simply treating illness, have since become bywords of health care policy.

Another opportunity arose when the Welsh Assembly Government launched its Strategy for Older People in 2003. This encouraged local authorities to engage with existing older people’s Forums and to help to establish new ones, and created a context for ongoing dialogue between Forums and policy makers at all levels. Many further examples of such engagement and of the influence that older people have had on policy are evident across the UK, locally, regionally and nationally*.

Today there are some 600 Forums across England alone. They have become the springboard from which older people across the country are able to engage with policy makers at many levels, confident that they are speaking from a position of strength. SUFOA has helped not just to sustain and develop individual Forums but to channel and focus the considered views of older people to where they can have most impact. Ten years on, older people have a rightful place at the table when policy and services are being discussed and a crucial role in helping to set that agenda.

I am proud to have been associated with these developments, and with the many people at Help the Aged and beyond who have contributed so much to the undoubted success of the SUFOA programme. What was once a conviction and an aspiration is today a reality. But there is no room for complacency. There is still a long way to go before the engagement of older people and their influence on policy and services become routine. There are always new fields where their contribution is needed: in identifying and challenging age discrimination in goods and services; in combating crime against older people; in improving dementia care; or in campaigning for better provision of public toilets so that people can get out and about without worrying, for example. But with Forums now widespread, the mechanism exists for older people to help to shape the policies that affect them and the communities they live in.

 

Reference

*Speaking Up for Our Age: the first ten years. Help the Aged, forthcoming.