1. 1 Prescribing Learning Kathryn James Development Officer Learning and Health

2. 2 Context  Health Inequalities  Learning Divide  Guidance Divide

3. 3 We need to:  Widen participation of adults in learning.  Understand the strategies to enable adults to cross the learning divide.  Understand how learning promotes better health and well-being.  Measuring the health impacts of participation in learning.

4. 4 Five approaches to learning and health  Learning about health.  Learning and health improvement through physical activity.  Learning and health improvement through arts and creativity.  Building self-esteem.  Prescriptions for Learning and general learning opportunities.

5. 5 Common Themes  Applied learning models.  Connectedness and emotional engagement.  Avoided deficit models and built on the positive.  Learning environment.  Inter-professional overlaps.

6. 6 Challenges  Guidance  The ‘glue’ of lifelong learning.  Investing in people.  Skilled job.  Not the cheap option.

7. 7 Partnerships  Multi-disciplinary, cross-sector.  Real and not token.  Learning process.  Time and cost implications.

8. 8 Funding  Cross-sector partnerships enable a patchwork of funding.  A strength and a weakness.  A distraction and a threat to credibility.  Part of the infrastructure of the work.  Need for a common funding framework.

9. 9 Evaluation  Evaluating to prove or improve.  Unpredictability but wealth of outcomes.  Managing evaluation across different aspects of people’s level.  Believe and accept what people say about their experience and perceptions.

10. 10 “Illness for me is like being in a dark room, but getting involved with learning is like having a window that lets light in. Learning doesn’t make the pain go away but it helps me to cope.” “Doing art …. to get a sense of perspective. I’ve sort of applied that principle to things in my life that stress me out.”

11. 11 “Its not just the learning, it’s the fact I’m doing something with my life, taking control, that makes me feel better.” “Since I started (learning) I have lost three and a half stone in weight. I am now much more in control of my life. I have stopped taking medication for depression and I no longer take sleeping tablets.”

12. 12 “And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight – isn’t that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you’re less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result : isn’t it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you’ve experienced before? You see things more clearly and you know that you’re seeing them more clearly. And it comes to you that this is what it means to love life….” Jonathan Franzen “The Corrections” 2001