This workshop discussed whether education should not only be important to gain knowledge for future job opportunities but also for personal development and showed the value of further education institutions and how unions could help.
This discussion was broken up with two mature students, who gave their stories on how being in further education has helped them.
The first to speak was a lady called Lorraine, 52, student at Islington College who said, through her studies she has not only learnt a multitude of different skills including, forensics, computing and her current course pottery.
Lorraine said “I decided to go to college to prove to people that I did have a bit of intelligence”, she openly admitted that she didn’t have a lot to keep her busy in life but through studying and being around people, she gained confidence to be more sociable. This made her feel better about herself and in turn led to her losing a considerable amount of weight.
Eugene then introduced a lady who is currently, as far as we know, the oldest living student today. Elisabeth, 94, is studying pottery at Islington College.
Elizabeth started studying pottery 18 years ago, when she was 76 after the passing of her husband, she said “if I didn’t go to college I would have become a vegetable, I would have been stuck between 4 walls”.
College gave Elizabeth not only the skills to become a master potter but also enabled her to socialise with like-minded people.
She recently had an unfortunate accident at college, where she tripped and broke her hip, but this didn’t stop her and she joked saying “I thought about crafting myself a new hip out of clay”.
The college threatened to close the pottery department due to an increase in students studying health and beauty related courses and needed to expand their resources, although they had just spent a large amount of money on two new pottery kilns. The course is still running throughout the week, and Lorraine and Elizabeth still attend.
These stories are an inspiration to mature students and students who just want to better their lives. This shows the importance of having further education courses available to not only gain valuable skills for job opportunities but also to enable people to socialise and become an active member of the local community.