Innovation: University of the Third Age

Czech Republic and Estonia

AAI Domain: Independent, healthy and secure living (lifelong learning)

The University of the Third Age (U3A) was founded by Professor Francois Vellas in Toulouse in 1973 and is now a global movement with millions of participants engaged in peer lead education on a wide variety of subjects. The U3A is one of the most successful social innovations for active ageing that has ever been developed and it can be regarded as one of the truly great achievements to address the needs of older people to engage in lifelong learning for its own sake and to potentially improve their employability.

There are estimated to be more than two million U3A students in China, there are branches in all 50 US states and nearly all European countries have a U3A. Clearly this is a global phenomena that is very well known and must be acknowledged in any collection of social innovations and in this case the focus is on two new EU member states to demonstrate how the U3A has been adopted and adapted to suit particular circumstances.

The U3A started in what was then Czechoslovakia after the Czechoslovak Red Cross had been running the Club of Active Ageing that ran Academies of the Third Age, a form of education for older people, since 1978. The first University of the Third Age started in Olomouc in 1986 with Prague following in 1987 but it was only after the velvet revolution in 1989 that the concept began to grow.

The Association of the University of the Third Age was established in 1994 and there was a steady expansion of U3A branches, particularly after 2000, as funding from the Ministry of Education supported the development of new places of learning for older people. The U3A’s in the Czech Republic follow the continental model and are associated with a university (whereas the Anglo-Saxon model of U3A rather less formal and is usually based on peer-learning) and charge modest fees for courses that can lead to matriculation and the award of a certificate of higher learning. The range of courses has increased over time with ICT being a particularly popular addition in recent years.

There are now more than 35,000 older people taking courses through the U3A, approximately 1.5% of the elderly population, in 36 locations across the country. It should be noted that most, but not all U3A students are receiving an old age or retirement pension as there are participants in their fifties who are still employed and take some courses.

When awarding funding to the U3A the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs pithily stated that ‘for the state budget it is better to have the elderly seated in lecture halls than doctors’ waiting rooms.’ From this shrewd observation, the U3A in the Czech Republic has grown up until 2011 when it was decided by the general assembly of the Association of the University of the Third Age that ensuring consolidation and support for existing provision should be the main focus of activity.

The University of the Third Age, known locally as the Universities of the Third Youth, started in Estonia in 2009 and now operates across six sites. The largest is based at the Technical University of Tallinn while the University of Tartu works in partnership with other educational and third sector organisations in other sites. With the huge transformations in Estonian society over the last generation, an important element of the initiative is educating and advising older people about politics, social policies, law and justice, nutrition and active ageing. There are nominal fees for older students with subsidies from the Ministry of Social Affairs, the universities as part of their wider social role and the Estonian Pensioner’s League as U3A is engaged on the process of scaling up activities.

In relation to active ageing, the Czech and Estonian examples demonstrate how the University of the Third Age can be adopted and adapted to suit particular local circumstances and still have positive effects. The U3A clearly has positive effects in relation to lifelong learning but there are also potential benefits from stronger social connections and improvements to mental well-being from learning and social interaction. The focus of the curricula differs in these two examples and in the case of Estonia the U3A can be seen as a means of informing older people on the benefits of active ageing no matter what their age.