Learning needs of this third age thus include appropriate training for these new roles, as well as a range of life skills in relation to health, housing, financial management, recreation and so on. Especially as they are more and more reliant on themselves rather than on the extended family. A testament to this is that over 30,000 learners are involved in the University of the Third Age Australia wide. There are now courses in Universities that teach how to teach adults. There are even courses on how to teach elderly adults.
Adult education is big business.
And yet in the corporate sense it largely went unauthorised, unrecognised and largely under resourced for most of this century. It was only when the Federal Government commissioned a report called 'Come in Cinderella' in 1991 which outed adult education and confirmed what had been happening that things really began to change. On one side a plethora of programs have sprung up. On the other side we now have a well-defined bureaucracy of adult education with ANTA, the Australian National Training Authority, Vocational Training Authorities in all States and Territories, a national professional association of lifelong learning and here in the ACT an Advisory Board and all the trappings of well defined national and state programs. We have certification and accreditation, we have quality controlled monitoring systems, we have big budgets and we have accountability.