Children and their parents

For many years in the UK along with other Western Countries a family could be thought of in terms of a household where children, their married parents and, on occasion, other close relatives such as grandparents live together. However, a number of factors have more recently converged and changed the ’shape’ of such families and households and led to alternatives to the nuclear model outlined above.

Demographic factors such as population ageing and migration, an increase in the breakdown of parental relationships, together with same-sex couples attaining equal; rights to those enjoyed by married ones, have all had an impact on household and family structures and living arrangements (Ermisch and Murphy, 2006).

Lone parent families.

Over the 30-year span between to the 1960s and the mid 1990s the number of nuclear families in the UK fell from 38 to 25% of all households (Clarke, 1996; Office of National Statistics, 1999). Although children living in two-parent households still form the majority, the proportion living in lone parent households (most of which comprise lone mothers) has doubled to around 23% over the last thirty years (Ermisch and Murphy, 2006).

While divorce is regarded as the main cause of lone parent families (Ermisch and Murphy, 2006), further effects on the number of lone parent families also arise from the large number of births to unmarried mothers. The proportion of women who cohabit in their first partnership has risen from about 25% for those born in the 1950s to around 80% for those born in the 1980s (Ermisch and Murphy, 2006). The number of children born outside of marriage has risen dramatically from 9% to 43% 1975 to 2004 and, importantly, the likelihood that cohabiting mothers will eventually form a longer lasting married relationship is less than for women without children. This has implications for intergenerational contact bearing in mind that, since the 1960s, one-parent families have tended to live solo rather than communally (Ermisch and Murphy, 2006). Even if some relationships do remain stable and monogamous, the occurrence in those who choose to ‘live apart together’ can also contribute to restricted parental contact.

The increase in divorce rates and cohabitation also gives rise to more complex arrangements such as reconstituted family households in which some children are the natural offspring of both parents, while in other cases are from just one (Ermisch and Murphy, 2006). On the one hand, an increase in step parenting could suggest a move away from norms expressed through kinship or marriage and could be seen as a social problem or deficit in terms of moral values and any stability that might be associated with these. On the other hand, it is also possible to see such alternatives to the nuclear model as a development of a different kind of social order (Silva and Smart, 1999; Smart, 2004). In terms of the potential for intergenerational contact, McCarthy et al’s (2003) work with step families or ‘clusters’ found that the wellbeing of children was nevertheless maintained in different ways. For example, while some working-class parents formed new non-kinship groupings within single households, middle class parents might maintain kinship links across different households. In all cases there was a sense of sustained relationships with children’s needs at heart. Although parental separation on the one hand can reduce the opportunity for intergenerational encounter, on the other hand, if parents split up and form new relationships this can also increase the range of adult contact available (Dench and Ogg, 2002).

Ethnic diversity

Further scope for diversity in families arises from immigration. For example, Prout (2008) cites a nine-fold increase in the total number of migrants in Western countries from 1965 to 1990 (International Labour Office, 2003, p26) with general agreement that this is an increasing trend (eg, Commission of the European Community, 2001; Ermisch and Murphy, 2006). However, interpreting sources such as UK census data is problematic. While 8% of those living in the UK are recorded as non-white ethnic minority, this could be an under-estimate because many, in particular younger, ethnic minorities are unlikely to register this affiliation (Harper and Levin, 2003). There is also the further issue regarding estimates of the age-distribution of minority groups (Harper and Levin, 2003). In short, the growth in ethnic diversity and concomitant effects of religious affiliation can be seen to have implications for diversity of childhood, children’s lived experience and formation of identity (Connolly, 1998; Garcia-Coll et al, 2004; Orellana et al, 2001 – all cited in Prout 2008,) Family size is a further factor that can vary substantially by ethnic group as suggested from data in the Second Survey of the Millennium Cohort Study. For example, ‘children in Bangladeshi families were most likely to have three or more siblings (32.6%) while White (8%), Mixed (8%) and Indian children (4.8%) were least likely (Hansen and Joshi, 2007).

Effects of an ageing population

It is well known that longer life expectancy coupled with a decline in birth rates have resulted in an ageing population. A recent analysis based upon data from the Office for National Statistics (Falkingham and Grundy, 2007) indicates that in the three decades from mid-1971 to mid-2004 the proportion of people under 16 fell from 25% to 9% while those aged 65 and over increased from 13% to 16% of the total population. It was also reported that while declining fertility played an initial part in population ageing for the UK, increased lifespan has now become a major factor. This is apparent in the current relatively large increase in number and proportion of those aged 85 and over. In addition to the above trends, age distributions are also modulated by earlier fluctuations in birth rates such as the bulge in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This will mean an increase in the numbers of the ‘younger elderly’ who will be in their 60s by around 2020 and who will, of course, eventually become the ‘older old’ (Falkingham and Grundy, 2007).

More specifically and with regard to opportunities for intergenerational encounters, using data from the 1998 British Social Attitudes Survey, Dench and Ogg (2002) have also noted that women giving birth to children in the late 1960s and early 1970s did so at a relatively early age. This has led to a high proportion of young grandparents with more than half of the British population becoming grandparents by the age of 54. When this is taken together with women currently having fewer children a living family can span a number of generations while the number of members belonging to each generation is relatively few. This demographic ‘beanpole’ effect (Hagestad, 2000) is also reflected more generally across Western societies (eg, Letablier and Pennec, 2003).

The availability of grandparents

Although parents and children may be seen as the centrepoint within families, other important roles have been ascribed to other close relatives, in particular grandparents.

In 2003, 26% of all dependent children in Great Britain received childcare from their grandparents (Social Trends, 2006, cited in Broad, 2007). Because grandparents live longer and healthier lives and parents are having children when they are younger, the role of grandparents is increasing (Jerrome, 1993). This also has the effect of increasing the length of time spent as a grandparent, often to around a third of the lifespan (Dench and Ogg, 2002).

Crucial factors influencing the role and level of involvement of grandparents have been identified as being proximity and lineage. Clarke and Roberts (2004) found that the distance grandparents lived from their children was the main factor relating to contact. Furthermore, they found that lineage, regardless of whether the grandparents were maternal or paternal, was more significant than family type in predicting contact: paternal grandparents generally seeing less of their sons’ children, particularly in cases of family breakdown.

The availability of grandparents is also influential in that today’s working mothers often do not have mothers who themselves have careers of their own. If women continue to take on greater career responsibilities and this is coupled with increasing population mobility, then the activity of grandparents in the role of childcare is likely to diminish (Broad, 2007).

In spite of the above concerns recent studies indicate that the level of involvement and frequency of contact of grandparents with their grandchildren is generally far greater than might have been expected. Dench and Ogg (2002) found that 95% of grandparents had seen their grandchild within the last two years and 73% were in physical contact at least once a month, whilst Clarke and Roberts (2004) found that 60% of grandparents saw their grandchild on a weekly basis and 60% also reported having other types of contact including telephone, letter and e-mail. A study carried out by Quadrello et al (2005) has examined the different forms of contact between grandparents and grandchildren between 10 and 15 years of age in the UK, Finland, Spain and Estonia. Face-to-face and landline phone contact were found to occur more frequently in comparison to contact using mobile phones. Texting, letters or cards and e-mail were used less frequently, although e-mail was used more often in the absence of face-to-face contact. Overall, however, the take-up of new communication modes between grandparents and grandchildren was in the minority, about one in eight, and less than might be expected in terms of technological availability. In view of the increasing availability of different channels of communication afforded by new technologies and the control that both young and old have with regard to their use, the effects of these as well as proximity of grandparent-grandchild contact may need further investigation.

Roles taken by grandparents

The roles undertaken by grandparents within the family are varied and their significance has been recognised for some years (DfES, 2003). Clarke and Roberts (2004) have put these into three main groupings: practical, emotional and financial. They found from their survey that childcare, especially with working parents, was a key practical feature with over half of the grandparents babysitting their grandchildren and around 60% looking after a grandchild aged under 15 in the daytime. According to Age Concern (2004), one in four grandparents care for their grandchildren on a regular basis, again, when the children’s parents are working or studying. Looked at from the point of view of children whose mothers are in employment, grandparents take a 34% share of informal childcare, followed by ‘other relatives’ (8%), ‘friends or neighbours’ or childminders (each 7%) (ONS, 2002). This has also been reflected in the first survey of the Millennium Cohort Study (Dex and Ward, 2004) where 33% of parents said that grandparents look after the first child all or most of the time whilst they were at work and carry out 78% of childcare at other times. Grandparents can play a number of important roles such as keeping wider sets of relatives connected and providing a bridge to the past by acting as a source of family history, heritage and traditions; the latter often carried out by telling stories that keep grandchildren aware of their own family experiences and culture (Ross et al, 2005).

While much of the care that is evident for children in their early years may decline as grandchildren get older (Dench and Ogg, 2002; Soule et al, 2005), there is evidence for the importance of the continuing support that is provided by grandparents (Hodgson, 1992). From a more recent study involving young people between the ages of 10 and 19 and their grandparents ranging from their early 50s to late 80s it was found that relationships were more likely to revolve around talking, giving advice and support as grandchildren grew older (Ross et al, 2005). Listening to grandchildren was generally regarded as a key role with many of the young people reporting that they could share problems and concerns with their grandparents who could also act as go-betweens in the family when there were disagreements with their parents (Ross et al, 2005).

Geographical proximity, as noted by Smith and Drew (2002), has been found to be a key factor, not only in the frequency of contact, but also in the closeness in grandparent-grandchild relationships. For example, Hodgson (1992) examined this by comparing those grandparents and grandchildren living within 25 miles of each other (almost half) with those living up to and beyond 500 miles away. A similar finding with grandfathers and grandchildren was obtained by Kivett (1985). Some indication of the prevalence of this closeness might be gained from figures reported by The National Centre for Social Research (1999) which suggest that, in the UK, between 30 and 40% of grandparents lived less than 15 minutes away from a grandchild. However, the extent to which physical distance alone reflects the degree of upbringing and emotional closeness is less clear and Ross et al (2005) have noted that, regardless of proximity, some children contact their grandparents independently of their parents. A further consideration is that it is middle class families who tend to be more geographically separated. While this may result in less frequent contact the deficit is offset by shared holidays, gifts and financial support. Moral values are also shared across generations in these cases (Dench and Ogg, 2002). Again, our knowledge of the effect of the increasing availability of new communication technologies such as e-mail mobile phones on the nature and role of grandparent-grandchild contact may benefit from continued review.

Class, educational and economic influences

The above effects concerning the availability and roles of grandparents are modulated by class and education. For example, divorce rates for those less educated were found to be some 30% higher than for those more educated (Ermisch and Murphy, 2006). A further demographic factor currently influencing intergenerational contact has been identified by Newman and Hatton-Yeo (2008). In response to changing economies families are likely to move to areas where there are better job prospects. Moreover, such economic demands are also accompanied by the increase in single-parent and two-working-parent families.

In addition to the above overall trends, families, of course, vary. There are class, cultural and economic factors. The age of women at their first partnership has also increased from 22 to 25 but the extent to which marriage and motherhood occur later in life has been found to be greater for women who have a higher education (statistics to be checked). Less educated women have children younger (around 24) while more educated women tend to have children when older (median in excess of 30) (Ermisch and Murphy, 2006).

Intergenerational Programs

The scope for intergenerational exchange and support between families can be seen to be compromised in view of some of the above factors such as children with lone or working parents, migration and economic relocation. In view of this there have been developments in provision aimed at purposeful extra-familial support that do not rely on the family. Newman and Hatton-Yeo (2008), for example, characterise these in terms of either educating the young or being concerned with the welfare of older adults. In particular they focus on the teaching and learning roles that can be played by bringing together the different age-groups. The perceived benefits of this enterprise include shared learning positive attitudes among generations and social cohesion (Newman and Hatton-Yeo, 2008)). The underlying theory is drawn from Erikson’s (1963) idea that parallel developmental needs of young and old result in a special kind of synergy between these generations. In view of this participants in intergenerational programmes are usually populated by those who are younger and older while missing out a middle generation. The idea that a generational synergy can be developed outside the family setting is, of course, fundamental to such programs.

In their review of the literature, Springate, Atkinson and Martin (2008) detail the range of ‘intergenerational practice’ in the UK and the role of those who take part in it. Although, these are extrafamilial enterprises and therefore lie outside the scope of the present discussion, acknowledgement of these is due in that the outcomes may feed back, even if mainly indirectly through any effects that they may have on the social ambience.

The family and intergenerational learning

So far the nature of families and households today and the contact between different generations such as children, their parents and grandparents has been outlined. In view of the impact of the different demographic, social, economic and cultural factors there is considerable diversity in families and how households are formed. It is against this background that the kinds of learning exchanges and personal developments that might occur can now be considered.

The family can be a hub of mutual support, influence and learning in a multitude of ways. Although some of these may be systematic and intentional, much of what may influence each family member can be informal and incidental. Shared values, expectations, aspirations, knowledge, beliefs, skills, behaviours and the language we use develop around the variety of domestic activities that family members engage in. These activities can range from playing together and talking to each other about each other to more specific pursuits such as sport, gardening, reading, shopping and watching TV. We are also living at a time where new information and communication technologies are finding their way into homes and lives at many different levels.

In one sense it is easy to characterise the role that older family members can play in handing down knowledge and wisdom as if these are fixed entities that can be passed down through generations. While certain skills and knowledge may be passed from one generation to the next, other things are continually changing. Not only are we living at a time of rapid scientific and technological development but we are also living at a time of rapid social and cultural change. In turn the demands made by society change in relation to these and what is valued and seen as relevant can influence how each individual develops.

The above resources of networks and norms of shared values are among the individual and community assets underlying the concept of social capital (Balatti and Falk, 2002). Social exclusion and disadvantage result in negative social capital (Bostrom, 2002) and the importance of the family as the individual’s initial source of social capital has been argued by Kerka (2003). She has registered concerns arising from social changes such as increased life expectancy, greater mobility, increased reliance on non-familial caregivers at both ends of the lifespan and a more age-segregated society such as retirement communities and youth culture and the potential for inequities working against characteristics of positive social capital (Schuller et al, 2002, cited in Kerka, 2003).

What is meant by ‘transfer’ and how this complements what else goes on between family members can lie at the heart of what is understood by learning. The phrase ‘intergenerational transfer of learning’ carries with it the idea that learning results from something that is transferred from one generation to another or, at least, a series of such acquisitions. Taken on its own this, of course, reduces learning to a quantitative increase in knowledge or procedures familiar to behaviourists; a one-way transaction thereby ignoring the agency of the learner. Constructivist or sociocultural approaches are well known in that they allow for learners acting on what they receive in their own way; building, modifying, and often discarding earlier mental structures so that learning can also become a way of seeing and understanding things differently; a qualitative change (eg, Fosnot, 1996; Wertsch and Tulviste, 1996). Acknowledging this creative potential in the learner not only transforms the idea of learning and what can go on amongst family members but also what society contributes to families as well as what families can contribute to society.

Family members respond to each other, each in their own unique way. In view of this there is a contribution that all family members, regardless of their generation, can make towards each other’s development as well as to the family as a whole. Even if a more experienced other plays a scaffolding role (Vygotsky, 1978) so that with this assistance a task can be carried out by a learner that would otherwise not be attempted successfully alone there is still scope for mutually helpful collaboration. This is, for example, inherent in Rogoff’s (1990) use of the term ‘guided participation’ which suggests a more active role played by children so they can collaborate with, as well as be guided by others. Intra-generationally, research carried out amongst siblings by Gregory (2001) suggests an evenly balanced interplay or ’synergy’ where understandings can be developed mutually rather than primarily in one direction. If the idea of transfer is to be considered more generally in the family setting then, firstly, its scope as a multi-way intergenerational phenomenon should be taken into account and, moreover, its relationship to learning considered in relation to a creative interplay or synergy.

Dissatisfaction with the idea of learning as acquisition has been expressed by Hodkinson and his co-workers (Hodkinson, 2005; Hodkinson et al, 2007) who see this as separating the learner from the process of learning and what is learned. In particular, they argue that ‘the processes and products of learning are deeply intertwined, and neither can be understood without considering the positions, dispositions, and identities of [the] learner’ (Hodkinson et al, 2007, p14) with no clear separation between learning and identity. For some people, each is part of the other with learning not just about becoming but also about being. A more recent characterisation of this has been cited by Plumb (2008) in the phrase ‘learning as dwelling’. Here it is also argued that learning is not about the intake of external knowledge into the mind of an isolated individual but a ‘process through which learners forever weave themselves into the fabric of their natural, social and cultural worlds’ (Plumb, 2008, p62).

A view of learning occurring as part of practice and the social interactions that take place in the associated settings has been developed by Lave and Wenger (1991). They argue a distinction between the approach to academic learning taken in schools or other education institutions and learning that occurs more naturally as part of day -to-day social activity. Academic approaches towards learning focus on representations of the world that have been abstracted from the real life setting where they would normally occur. These representations can then be manipulated theoretically and can be helpful in developing explanations and predictions about the world. As McCormick (1997) has noted, knowledge derived in this way is applicable more generally to a variety of situations whereas practical knowledge is limited to particular situations. While academic approaches can focus on more conscious systematic forms of teaching, by way of contrast learning may arise within the practice occurring in an everyday setting (Lave, 1989). In this way learners engage less formally from their own perspective rather than from an external perspective that might otherwise characterise a teaching curriculum. In this way learning is situated within, rather than isolated from, the practical setting and the social relations that form part of this (Lave and Wenger, 1991).

Learning also occurs within a community comprised of participants who make a range of contributions. A key point is that the contributions can be at different levels depending on those who happen to be participating in an activity where understandings and purposes are shared. Lave and Wenger (1991) use the term ‘community of practice’ in relation to individuals who participate in a common purpose and share understandings about their actions in relation to this.

The family can be likened to a community of practice in the sense that there is mutual support with members playing complementary roles in the practice of day-to-day living without any external systematic learning agenda. Even with children growing up as part of a family in business their early experiences of the social practice within the family and the knowledge and skills associated within this are inextricably linked (Hamilton, 2006). On some occasions what is shared and learnt can be more systematic and focused while in many other respects learning can be incidental and informal.

From her ethnographic study of working class children between the ages of 8 and 10 Maddock (2006) has drawn attention to the unique range of experiences and opportunities provided by families for their children. Through this, children may come to value some activities rather than others. Underlying these differences, though, was a common but subtle agenda for children’s learning linked to personal human concern into which children fit activities and experiences in terms of what makes ‘human sense’ (Donaldson, 1978). This she has contrasted with the more externally driven and overtly goal-directed learning agendas that can be imposed by adults.

Families are not formal learning institutions and although they are populated in part by adults the learning space can be very different from the more uniform and target-driven demands that have to be managed within the confines of a learning initiative. If intergenerational programmes and extrafamilial paradigms (Newman and Hatton-Yeo, 2008) are being implemented in response to a perceived deficit in some children’s lives then a key challenge for the future is to preserve some of those qualities of the family learning space and the associated diversity.

Some insight into the learning dynamics that go on within families can be gained through the work carried out by Kenner et al, (2005) in homes in East London. Although there was a focus on the learning that evolved through interactions between children and their grandparents, the position of parents in this context was also considered. The focus was on the role of grandparents in view of the significant role they play in childcare.

Time constraints upon parents

In contrast to parents who were working and busy with a variety of day to day responsibilities, grandparents could spend more time with their grandchildren and develop a special bond (Weissvourd, 1998). Children and their grandparents each had their own vulnerabilities and were able to offer mutual support for each other. There was scope for a more relaxed and hands-on relationship when engageing in activities (Jessel et al, 2004). The home setting, then, could offer scope for a more evenly balanced learning relationship, or ’synergy’ (Gregory, 2001) than might occur in more formal educational contexts. In particular, synergistic learning relationships occurred between children and their grandparents. This gave scope for reciprocal social relationships and joint interaction in learning and contrasts with the role of the teacher as controller rather than as learning partner (Bruner, 1985). In the context of the family, mutual trust and respect for each member’s perspective (Rommetveit, 1974, 1979) was regarded as important to this process. The value given to an activity within a culture in which learners identify can also influence learning interactions (Goodnow, 1990).

Reading and language

Families can play a key role in the development of literacy. A parent reading books to children is an everyday part of life in many families. Although this can involve both mothers and fathers, it has been found that mothers tend to do this more (Nichols 2000; Connie and Sharen, 2004). Grandparents also make important contributions to their grandchildren’s education (Strom and Strom, 1995) and with regard to literacy performance, grandparents’ reading skills and practices are reflected across generations (Parsons and Bynner, 2006). This was also evident from the work carried out by Kenner et al (2005). A further focus on the story-reading within Bangladeshi families revealed how the multiple worlds inhabited by a grandchild during story-reading were transformed ’syncretically’ on a number of levels (Gregory et al, 2007). The idea of syncretism as a creative process where people reinvent culture, drawing on familiar and new resources is argued to be of central importance in that it allows for cultures to develop rather than remain frozen. This was evident within the books that were used, such as through the pictorial illustrations, as well as linguistically in the story reading (Gregory et al, 2007).

The role of new technologies

Although the parts taken by human beings as key players in family life have been outlined, there is another element that is finding its way into people’s relationships: new information and communication technologies (ICTs). If we regard these solely in terms of such functions as storing and retrieving information and communication to others then they may not appear to be so new. However, what marks out the present day developments in this field are their portability, accessibility and affordability.

New technologies and family communication

The number of older as well as younger people using mobile phones and the internet to communicate has increased in recent years (Haddon, 2004; Age Concern, 2002; Mobile Data Association, 2005). Attitudes amongst elderly towards internet use have been found to vary from the ‘users’ who were open to learning something new regardless of their age and ‘non-users’ who did regard age as an obstacle (Blit-Cohen and Litwin, 2004). Health factors such as deteriorating eyesight also marked out users from non-users. Active social communication was found to take place over the internet. The extent to which people own and use technology also has a bearing on the availability of social support. From their European study Mante-Meijer et al (2001) found that in countries where the technologies have penetrated less there was greater reliance on settings where the relevant skills could be learnt formally. Informal learning, more evident in high-penetration countries, was found to take place in a variety of contexts such as within families and between work colleagues. Although Selwyn (2004) has found that the extent to which children influence their parents’ take-up of computers was slight, children were able to play a more active part in this with their grandparents. The situation has, of course, been rapidly changing over the last few years as new technology has penetrated and proliferated. More recently, Gatto and Tak (2008) have reported increasing use by older adults of computers for communication as well as entertainment and access to information.

New technologies and family learning

Based on a survey of the views of parents of children from 3 to 5 years of age attending nurseries in Scotland, McPake et al (2005) have identified three types of competence developed through the use of ICT: technical (basic operational skills), cultural (understanding of the social roles that ICT plays) and learning. The latter, seen to be of particular significance to young children, refers to their ability to use ICT for social and cultural purposes, including communication, self-expression and entertainment as well as their work. ICT was used in the home to support early literacy and numeracy, communication and musical skills, as well as in helping children learn how to learn. Importantly, the degree of competence children had acquired appeared to depend on such factors as access to equipment, support in learning to use it, and the particular interests and aptitudes of older family members. The authenticity seen to be afforded by technological activities can aid learning (Murphy and Hennessy, 2001). This has been followed up in the family context by Jane and Robbins (2004) who have also reported on the potential benefit of such activities to grandparents in that it allows them to revisit and explore technology in a new and fresh way as a result of interacting with their grandchildren. Kenner et al (2008) noted the role of the computer as mediating artefact (Crook, 2001) and participant in learning activities with grandparents and grandchildren. In this context, however, the importance of the role of the grandparent in structuring the approach to the activities was also noted (Kenner et al, 2008).

The future: changes and challenges

We can look into the future in different ways. At one level the predicted patterns of ageing might not surprise us. People will live longer and healthier lives and assuming the reduction in fertility rates continues, then in the coming decades over half the population in the UK will be over 50. Although there will be transient effects such as the ‘age wave’ resulting from the high fertility rates of the 1960s, there will continue to be a large representation of older people and different generations of families with relatively few offspring co-existing. We may also be unsurprised about the forecast that with continuing rates of migration, ethnic diversity will also become more widespread within the UK. We might also make a reasonable guess at the career involvement and the prevalence of working mothers as well as fathers increasing within the system with the consequent reduction of availability of within-family childcare. We might also be quite comfortable predicting that technology may not only change but become more available.

What may be more difficult to predict, however, is how the different trends might interact. For example, while there is more scope for ethnic diversity within families, the cultural effects are not certain. It is not certain, for example, to what extent immigrant groups will become assimilated, nor how acculturation will take effect, so that the values, the culture and the customs merge with the majority population with time. Conversely, some communities might retain a strong heritage and cultural identity. There may be further tensions in retaining identity if family members are dispersed geographically because of economic demand and globalisation. While information and communication technologies have the power to enable younger family members to become independent and lose their cultural identity they can also, at the same time, facilitate cultural contact within and across national boundaries. It is likely that the continued weakening of horizontal household ties through divorce and other instabilities in relationships will mean that vertical intergenerational links and influences will become more important (Owen et al, 2004). However, this will also be in a context where an increased active lifespan together with employment rights for the elderly may mean that those family members who in the past have played this role may become more likely to take on the pivotal role of working and supporting those both younger and older than themselves (Dench and Ogg, 2002). We do not know how family members will continue to balance these demands and whether families can remain as coherent cohesive units. We do not know whether grandparents will continue to have the time for childcare and that special bond and, for that matter, whether grandfathers rather than grandmothers will have to play a greater role.

The challenge for some minority communities could be in terms of maintaining a heritage identity. Even if there are collective communal initiatives that support this, the role of the family could be crucial in this respect. While grandparents have been an active source of cultural knowledge and practice in the past, how this role might be picked up by future generations is less certain. In addition, particular occupations and the associated skills are less likely to remain stable within a given family and so learning needs could become less predictable. In turn this could affect the status of older generations as authoritative sources of information and skills. We are also living at a time when information is not only much more readily accessible but also is there in greater variety, quantity, detail and abundance.

Work patterns will affect what goes on within families. Apart from the possibility of a longer active life which has career implications, the demands of the labour market in response to shortages of particular skills will mean that patterns in work, training and education will change when viewed from a life-long perspective. The blurring of boundaries between living, working and learning currently experienced may continue to progress; particularly as new technologies, mobile communications, and global business practices can keep people electronically connected at all times of the day and night regardless of whether they are at a place of work, at home, or on holiday (Harrison, 2008). Perhaps the biggest challenge to families in relation to this context is managing the balance between work and leisure – or, indeed, a new order of family life. Although flexible working patterns could assist this process there is also the possibility that the more traditional opportunities for family and intergenerational interaction, such as in the evenings and at weekends, may disappear.

A report carried out by the Future Foundation (2004), has suggested that up to 23 million people in the UK may be at risk of digital exclusion in 2025. While in the past a ‘digital divide’ has been framed in terms of a lack of availability of digital resources, more sophisticated notions of digital inclusion or exclusion also consider broader problems of social inclusion and engagement (Warschauer, 2004). Selwyn (2002), for example, argues that access to technology in itself is insufficient in promoting a digitally inclusive society and results from an adult continuing education survey carried out with his co-workers (Gorard et al, 2000) support his contention that access should be meaningful, functional, and of perceived relevance. In terms of social capital this also presents a challenge that belongs as much to the family as in the public domain. The use of ICT in the home can reduce the time that families interact as a whole. Sanger’s (1997) work suggests that, in contrast to a family watching the same programmes on the one and only television receiver in the house, the increased availability of technology such as video games has segregated families; parents, for example, know very little about what their children are doing when they are each in their own rooms in different parts of the home. We are, perhaps, living at a time when families could be encouraged to negotiate rules around the use of new technologies. On this basis there is a need for parents to talk to children about the dangers of the internet and encourage them to look critically at the information they find on the internet and other media. Similarly, as more mobile phones become available, it is timely to address questions on how such technology is shaping family life and how families are shaping the use of technology.

While this article began with a characterisation of the family in terms of the space delineated by a household and relatively monogamous relationships, the possibility exists for the development of more complex relationships involving different generations including parents and children. What we regard as a ‘virtual’ space today may take on a more tangible coherent and connected life of its own as we are able, through communication technologies, to maintain, sustain and develop relationships. The space in which we live and learn may no longer be defined by four walls and a roof. In this context the challenge for ‘family’ members may be one of identifying and contributing to a group identity, even if this identity is dynamic in nature. The syncretic processes (Gregory, 2001) noted earlier could have a role to play here.

The implications arising from the possible blurring of chronological divisions of education (Harper, 2008) for intergenerational learning are widespread. Segmentation of education may be less distinct. For example, the role of the university could become a more continuous one where people remain connected as part of a life long learning community. With regard to children’s learning and development, another challenge is for teachers to know more about the learning that goes on within families so that they can learn from this as well as allow their own institutional approaches (which will be different) to interface in a sensitive way. This is still an under-researched area. While studies such as the Teaching and Learning Research Programme’s Learning Lives (Hodkinson et al, 2008) have begun to contribute to the literature on the kind of learning going on throughout peoples lives both formally and informally, further attention will still be needed in understanding the different kinds of learning, cultural practices and development taking place in a variety of out-of-school settings including the family.

Older people, of course, are not fixed entities. The older people of 2050 will have been the younger people of today who will have taken with them not only the practices we associate with young people today but also some of the attitudes to change and flexibility that we may consider a hallmark of our time. Assuming the infants of today will be the elders of the future then, to survive as a responsive and flexible community in a changing world, what they will take with them into that future will not just be the transferred remnants of yesterday but also the ability to play their part in creating the culture of tomorrow.

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This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

Training and education is individually and societally important. Their primary purpose is perhaps best summed up by the following remarks from the rector of Harvard University, who although speaking specifically about the role of a university, encompasses the essence of all education:

“A university is not about results in the next quarter; it is not even about who a student has become by graduation. It is about learning that moulds a lifetime; learning that transmits the heritage of millennia; learning that shapes the future.”

(Drew Faust, Rector of Harvard, in his inaugural address in 2007)

When – as we shall see in the body of this review – people in later life are saying they want to be responsible and contribute in the workplace, the community and the family, they are also saying they need the skills to do this, and these will often be skills that they may not have acquired through education and training earlier in life. Education in an ageing society is key to the quality of life of people in later life (Mercken, 2004).

When people in later life need to prepare financially and socially for this stage of their life, they are also saying they need the skills to do this.

As longevity has increased, most individuals face the prospect of spending a quarter of their lives in training and education (at the beginning of their lives), 30-40 years in the workplace, and 20-30 years in retirement. The balance of lifelong learning needs to reflect this demographic life course balance.

There can be no question that quality pre-primary, primary, secondary, higher and vocational education and training are extremely important in a globalised world with intense competition, but there is inherently more to education and training than early learning alone. Lifelong learning is essential for the constant up-skilling that is required in a fast developing world, where technology and demographic change pose their own challenges and opportunities in the workplace. But lifelong learning and late life learning are more than equipping people for the workplace. They are also concerned with equipping individuals of all ages for full citizenship in their families and communities, enabling them to make contribution and be responsible for development.

The education and training policies of the European Union were in theory at least boosted by the Lisbon Strategy in 2000. This, however, focused on growth and jobs and as such is a narrow focus given the ageing of European populations and the changing perceptions and expectations of the older age groups in these populations. The European strategy still provides some key issues worthy of note in a UK context for later life and education.

According to the Council of the European Union, in the wake of its agreement that Member States should have coherent and comprehensive lifelong learning strategies in place by 2006, the status is that most Member States, members of the EEA and Croatia and Turkey have progressed in respect of at least defining strategies, but lifelong guidance needs particular attention (European Commission, 2008). Countries are at one of the following stages of progress in this area: a strategy, framework, validation system or national policies in place (17 countries); developing strategy, framework or validation system (7); lifelong learning policies in place but no explicit strategy (7). However, implementation remains the greatest and most difficult challenge. According to the Commission report on progress, adult participation in lifelong learning is no longer on track to achieve the benchmark, which at 12.5% of 25-64 year olds participating in education and training is higher than the EU average in 2006 of just 9.6%. However, the UK participation in 2006 stood at more than 25%. Generally, the participation of older workers in these activities is problematic.

The German Government acknowledges that lifelong learning is one of the biggest political and societal challenges facing Germany today (Federal Ministry of Education and Research, 2008) and that implementing the ideas of the European Action Plan is critical to the future of the individual, of society and of trade and industry, taking the role of lifelong learning solidly outside the traditional arena of the workplace. The German Government’s Committee on Innovation in Continuing Training make 10 recommendations, which may feed usefully into the UK debate on lifelong learning and learning in later life. Some of these recommendations relate to:

• motivation and responsibility: an individual’s motivation and willingness should be increased, and general public awareness to the need for lifelong learning in a changing globalised world is key
• recognition and acceptance: a move toward skills and competences would increase acceptance of lifelong learning. Learning processes need to encourage active (full) citizenship
• linked and cross-cutting sectors of learning: this is vital to establish equal opportunity
• transparency, quality, development and expansion
• integration through education: intercultural education to foster intercultural skills
• intergenerational learning: lifelong learning must remain attractive post-employment
• active participation in a democratic culture, tolerance and open-mindedness
• expansion of lifelong learning for and with enterprises
• learning without borders.

Let us then look at what research tells us about later life and the future, the changes and the challenges.

2. The changes and the challenges

The UK demographics of ageing speak their own clear speak. The number and therefore potentially the visibility of people in later life have increased, and with visibility comes demands. A particular aspect of recent (and future) demographic development is the increasing ethnic diversity of the UK population in view of the high levels of immigration (Leeson, 2005b). Migrants pose particular challenges to an ageing population – both in respect of their labour force participation but also in respect of their ageing in place. In terms of labour force participation, there is the issue of “green card” restrictions, a particularly sensitive issue with regard to ageing as many migrants work with the health and social care of older people (Leeson and Harper, 2006a; Cangiano and Leeson, 2008). Ageing in place brings cultural confrontation – family-based care tradition in a regime of welfare provision. However, there is the key issue of lifelong learning for migrants, many of whom see the UK as a stepping stone to other countries (primarily the USA, but also elsewhere in the EU) and lifelong learning to enhance full citizenship is unlikely to be pertinent to a group who see themselves as part of a global rather than a national community. Indeed, this latter aspect of the globalisation of citizenship may also apply to younger groups of non-migrants in the UK, and the question of citizenship education at the global versus the national level therefore needs to be addressed: is it possible to encourage full national citizenship (with all that that concept entails) while rooting this in a globalisation context? The German Government Committee on Continuing Training highlights that globalisation and the rise of the knowledge society pose enormous challenges that demographic change will considerably amplify, and in this context the importance of learning as more than a workability qualifier is key (Federal Ministry of Education and Research, 2008). In addition, the Committee underlines the position of Germany as a country with many immigrants and the role of lifelong learning in the integration process.

In addition, the concept of retirement from the workplace has changed dramatically, moving from rest to reward to right, and now arguably moving to one of responsibility (Harper, 2006; Leeson and Harper, 2006, 2007, 2008). While it has been argued that retirement is associated with a significant loss of identity for the individual (Phillipson, 1998), more recent research would indicate that this is no longer generally the case (Leeson, 2006; Leeson and Harper, 2006, 2007).

Not only has the concept and content (Leeson, 2006) of retirement changed, but the timing has changed dramatically over the course of the last two or three generations. This was a result of the introduction of early retirement schemes across Europe and given the anomaly of early retirement and increasing longevity, policy responses in recent years has been to encourage/force late life workers to remain in the workplace (Ebbinghaus, 2006). The individual and societal consequences for changes in the balance of life stages has a number of defining outcomes (Laslett, 1989; Blaikie, 1999), much of which is associated with the rhetoric rather than the rationale, much the same way that an ageing population moved from a problem to a challenge to an opportunity in the course of 20-30 years at the end of the 20^th century, despite the underlying demographic trends at least remaining unchanged. So in the 1980s, we saw the introduction of the third age rather than old age and this would require gargantuan efforts from societal institutions to adjust to the needs and demands of these cultural trustees of the future (Laslett, 1989). Third agers were active, well-educated, well-off, in good health and demanding – and, above all, different from previous generations. However, not to deny that this stage of life may well be defined also by dependency and frailty at some stage, the fourth age was conveniently coined.

Research focused on these new generations of third agers – the baby-boomers – and the ways in which they would change society fundamentally (Leeson, 2006; Carnegie UK Trust, 1993). There was an implicit danger in the glorification almost of later life that dependency and frailty would become phenomena of a bygone age. Strangely, what began quite simply as a rejection from the workplace became a defining moment for a new generation of consumers with a completely new lifestyle for this life stage (Blaikie, 1999; Vincent, 1999).

So later life, in the first decade of the 21^st century, is firmly defined as a life stage of choice, control, independence, opportunity, creativity and personal development without significant financial fears, at least for the majority (Leeson and Harper, 2007, 2008; AXA, 2008)

In the following, we shall consider key areas of importance in later life to the individual and to society. In understanding the expectations of people to these key areas, we shall understand the cohorts in later life – and be better equipped to meet their needs and harness their talents.

2.1. Housing

During the course of the latter decades of the 20^th century, housing and ageing became a central issue in discussions relating to the preparation for retirement. Despite repeated calls for mobility and to move in time, both younger and older generations display a solid lack of propensity to move to housing, which would be more suitable in later life. Staying put is still the preferred option (Leeson, 2000, 2001, 2004). Efforts were made to improve the availability and choice of suitable housing options for the ageing population. These options were designed to address the promotion of independence and self-determination in later life, something which had been the focus of research up through the 1990s (Leeson et al, 2004). The policy aim was to enable people as they aged to remain in the home of their choice for as long as they desired, although there was evidence of an increasing interest in alternative forms of housing in later life (Leeson, 2001; Daatland, 2000).

Increasingly, housing and ageing are now seen from the perspective of independent, resourceful people in search of attractive housing in later life. Gone is the idea that retirement meant sheltered accommodation and wardens.

As Leeson, Harper and Levin (2004) point out much of the discussion about housing in later life has little foundation in empirical evidence elucidating the preferences of those concerned. Instead, discussions are often based on preconceived ideas about the attitudes, behaviour and aspirations of these people, relating more therefore to the assumptive world of policy makers and providers than to that of people themselves (Wilson, 1991, 1997).

An individual’s home is now a defining part of his/her identity and lifestyle. It is where we relax, entertain, are entertained, share our experiences with family and friends, learn. It is from here we communicate with the world. Given the lifestyle association of housing and the changing role of people in later life, a change of housing in later life is indeed a lifestyle choice (Hanson, 2001). This lifestyle choice is reflected to some extent in King et al (2000) with reference to older people moving to the warmer climes of Southern Europe, for example, for part of the year.

The research reveals that generations have been, and in later life expect to remain, staying put generations (for example, Leeson, 2006). However, it would seem that the prepare-for-later-life debate has at least brought about one significant change – the proportion stating that they had not thought about their housing needs and desires in later life has been eliminated. This does not mean, however, that people expect in great numbers to seek out new and alternative forms of housing in later life. On the contrary, they expect to stay put. Even in the face of increasing dependency on the support of others, staying put remains the expectation of most.

In terms of attitudes and behaviours of those generations retiring over the next 20-30 years, there are a number of interesting conclusions from the research:

Although it is unlikely that mobility will increase significantly or permanently housing will become a key part of our lifestyle and identity. Our homes will be centres of activity, including not only of social leisure but also of educational attainment as we, as individuals, see the benefits of life long continued education – not necessarily as a meritable aim but more as a means to achieve optimal lifestyle benefits in later life. Learning will need to come into the home but individuals will also seek learning combined with social activity both at home and abroad, combining community contribution as a volunteer (also abroad) with individual experience;

However, despite our increasing longevity, there will still be a period – albeit decreasing – of our lives when we need help and support in our homes. We shall be increasingly reluctant to sacrifice our independence. Access to information via technological channels will have made us and our families knowledgeable and challenging to the providers of help and support. Immediate redress to social services will decline as we seek alternative, more flexible solutions to our help and support needs – e.g. live-in migrant carers.

2.2 Late life work and retirement

The ageing of the population has led to political and economic consideration with regard to the intergenerational social contract on which many welfare models are dependent. In many countries, there is increasing doubt about the robustness of pensions systems, both public and private, both with regard to the financing of these and with regard to their ability to live up to people’s welfare expectations in old age (Munell, 2002; Clark, 2003; Whiteside, 2002).

As discussed above, on the one hand, demographic development is extending the length of life expectancy, and on the other hand, withdrawal from the labour force has been occurring earlier since the introduction of early retirement schemes in the 1970s and 1980s, although the average age of withdrawal has shown some signs of increase in line with the aims of the EU Lisbon Treaty.

Across Europe, there is a divergence of gender differences in labour force participation, and in broader terms the structural changes in labour forces in terms of gender equality have reached those aged 45-60 years.

Research reveals that work has a relatively low level of importance in relation to identity (Leeson and Harper, 2007; Leeson, 2004, 2006). Family is most important in terms of identity (two thirds of those aged 40-60 years globally according to the Global Ageing Survey (Leeson and Harper, 2007)).

With the advent of early retirement and partial retirement schemes, and with an increasing recognition of the importance of the ageing workforce and population, a wealth of research was carried out to elucidate the popularity of such schemes, their success in bringing unemployed young people into the labour force, attitudes to the schemes among both employees and employers, levels of satisfaction, and life after withdrawal from the labour force (for example, Clark and Spengler, 1980; Clark, 1980; Hurd and Boskin, 1984; Pozzebon and Mitchel, 1989; Trinder et al, 1992; Hurd and McGarry, 1993; Guillemard and Walker, 1994; OECD, 1996; Walker, 1997; Platman, 2003; Taylor, 2003; Platman and Maltby, 2004; Taylor et al, 2004; Leeson and Harper, 2006).

In relation to attitudes and expectations to withdrawal from the labour force, we shall focus on the pre-retirement generations aged 40-60 years, drawing particularly on results from the Danish Longitudinal Future Study and the Global Ageing Survey to underpin general trends. Among those still working in these pre-retirement generations, almost 50% at the global level expect to continue working for as long as possible with an additional 30% expecting to retire when they are old enough to receive their pension. Only just over 10% expect to take early retirement. Similar trends are found in the UK with 41 per cent expecting to continue working for as long as possible, 29% expecting to retire when they are old enough to receive their pension, and 18 per cent expecting to take early retirement.

The corresponding figures for those still-working after age 60 years at the global level are 54% expecting to continue working for as long as possible, 17% expect to retire when they are old enough to receive their pension, and just 5 per cent expect to take early retirement, while they are 57%, 20% and 3% respectively in the UK. Furthermore, globally, approximately 70% of the cohorts expecting to continue working will do so because they want to work rather than feeling they have to continue to work, and in the UK this is true for 82%.

Thus, substantial numbers of over 50s are still working, globally and in the UK, and among these early retirement does not seem to be the preferred option.

By the early 21^st century, as governments initiate measures to discourage early retirement, it does seem that expectations have stabilised, and there is a measure of success in halting the increasing expectations to retire early. However, it is still the case that proportions expecting to take early retirement are higher among skilled workers, among employees with occupational pensions, and among those expecting a better standard of living after withdrawal.

Longitudinal analyses of the timing of withdrawal from the labour force reveal that those stating that they expect to retire early in successive waves comprise the most stable group inasmuch as this group has the smallest proportion changing their expectations between waves. In addition, among those changing their expectations there is a significant shift towards expecting to take early retirement.

Reforms of early retirement and pensions scheme are but one of a number of initiatives from the social partners to encourage employees to delay their withdrawal from the labour force. Another is the promotion of flexibility in respect of withdrawal, paving the way for part-time work and flexible working hours as an attractive alternative to the sudden transition from economic activity to economic inactivity.

However, it seems that those generations close to retirement would simply prefer to withdraw from the labour force. Interestingly, where some form of flexibility in employment prior to withdrawal from the labour force is a preferred option, it is often not possible in the workplaces in question, indicating that the efforts of the social partners to promote this attractive option to retain ageing workers in the workplace is not feeding through to the workplace to the extent that could be desired.

Which factors could encourage employees to remain longer in the labour force than they envisage doing? There are a number of economic, workplace, educational and personal incentives and disincentives to delaying withdrawal from the labour force, but it is clear that no single incentive/disincentive could delay significantly the withdrawal of the generations approaching retirement.

Increasing the age at which early retirement is available and a reduction in working hours could each delay withdrawal, while other initiatives would only delay withdrawal for modest proportions of workers.

The economic incentive of an increasing pension for each year withdrawal is delayed beyond the early retirement age would delay withdrawal from the labour force for a relatively small proportion of the generations. Even the effect on withdrawal behaviour of making early retirement more difficult by increasing the age at which early retirement is available is limited.

Workplace incentives such as a reduction in working hours, aligning the pace of work and employees’ capabilities, and providing different forms of work to match capabilities would only delay withdrawal for small sections of the generations approaching retirement. Support in the workplace is not an unimportant issue.

Clearly, the factors determining the timing and form of withdrawal from the labour force in the future are complex and varied. The research indicates that there is a similar complex and varied set of factors that could influence future decisions about withdrawal. Most striking is the effect – albeit modest – of recent reforms of early retirement and pension schemes. While securing the continued and longer attachment to the labour force of some, the expectation of large proportions is still to retire early.

Early retirement seems to be a solid feature of the labour market, and there is little evidence that this behaviour can be changed easily or speedily, neither by incentives nor by disincentives. At the moment, there appears to be no single (acceptable) policy initiative that could radically change the behaviour of generations over the next 15-20 years. Since the introduction of early retirement schemes, the social partners have spent almost a quarter of a century educating workforces to retire early and to plan for life after retirement. Those efforts have been successful, much to the chagrin of contemporary decision makers concerned about this behaviour. In addition to the entrenched withdrawal behaviour, there is evidence of a lack of interest in retaining older workers in the workplace despite efforts from policy makers to encourage this. Delaying withdrawal from the labour force seems to be unattractive from both the employee’s and the employer’s point of view.

In terms of attitudes and behaviours of those generations retiring over the next 20-30 years, there are a number of interesting conclusions from the research:

attitudes and expectations indicate that early retirement will still be the preferred option, but there is a willingness to continue if conditions are right

contribution is again a key issue for the retiring generations of the future. Life long continued learning is then key to this needing to be able to provide up-skilling and re-skilling not purely in a workplace context but in a familial and community context

unless the social partners can make work more attractive and rewarding in later life, most are geared to early retirement.

2.3 Financial security in later life

Retirement is a complicated concept. It can be regarded as the state in which one withdraws completely and permanently from paid work; or the state in which one begins to receive a pension (state or other); or the (psychological) state in which one regards oneself as retired from (paid) work. Regardless of definition of the concept, the majority of males and females in the UK have retired before the state pension age – two thirds of males and more than half of females have stopped working before the state pension age.

Historically, retirement decisions are influenced by the institutional structures that either encourage or discourage retirement at a particular age (Harper, 2006). An example of the effects of institutional structures in recent times is the introduction of early retirement schemes in many developed economies in the 1970s and 1980s and the subsequent massive loss of older workers from the workplace before state pension age (Ebbinghaus, 2006), as discussed above. According to Banks and Smith (2006), this institutionalisation of the timing of retirement has led to two distinct early retirement groups in the UK based on a wealth parameter. For those with high levels of wealth, early retirement has been facilitated by private, occupational pensions, while for those with low levels of wealth, early retirement is not only at an earlier age, financed by income support or disability benefits, and it is not regarded by individuals themselves as retirement. Clearly these two groups have vastly different levels of financial security and – underlying that security – levels of preparedness.

Studies reveal that the timing of retirement and whether it is complete or partial are determined by an individual’s financial preparedness as they perceive this (for example, Samwick, 1998), although a number of other factors also seem to influence this decision such as health status, labour force status of spouse/partner (Banks and Smith, 2006; Leeson, 2004). Arkani and Gough (2006) provide analyses that also support the link between the timing of retirement and membership of occupational schemes, and given this body of evidence, it is worth noting at this stage that according to data from the British Household Panel Survey (1991-2003) presented in Banks and Smith (2006), occupational pensions are more common among older male workers. Almost half of females have neither an occupational nor a private pension. Likewise, smaller proportions of females have both types of pension, while the proportion of both males and females born in 1960 or later with occupational pensions is around half.

There is a body of research that underlines the fact that women hitherto face greater financial disadvantage in retirement than their male counterparts (for example, Ginn et al, 2001; Rake, 1999; Olsberg, 2005; Clare, 2004). There are also gender specifics at play in respect of retirement confidence and planning (Joo and Pauwels, 2002). Significantly more males have estimated their financial needs in retirement and it is likely that such initiatives increase the probability of financially preparing for retirement (Joo and Pauwels, 2002).

A recent national general population study (CIPD, 2003) confirms that large numbers of people do not understand their pension schemes, although understanding and awareness seems to be greater among those closer to retirement. There was a strikingly low level of awareness of the cost of financial comfort on retirement. But given this lack of understanding, does it matter what type of pension scheme one has? According to Blake (2000), the answer is “yes” – if you are concerned about your pension! Blake agrees with others (for example, Howse (2004) and Breyer (2001)) that unfunded state pensions schemes are unlikely to be sustainable, basing this belief on demographic imbalances, and counter-arguing instead that funded pension schemes will be able to deliver the pension promise.

The UK is settling into a pensions structure where most of the pension schemes now being established are defined contribution schemes, but these have a number of “alert characteristics” – high charges, considerable dispersion in the performance of investments, and poor value for money on annuities. It is for these reasons that Blake (2000) asserts that when we choose our pension schemes (assuming we indeed have a choice), we have difficult choices to make. While this is an eminently sensible assertion, it is based on a presupposition that we are knowledgeable and critical consumers of the pension schemes market. While Blake (2000) analyses the pros and cons of defined benefit and defined contribution schemes and then goes on to make policy recommendations for government, there is no real comfort or advice for the individual consumer, whom he claims has difficult choices to make. Instead, he cites inadequate pension savings as the greatest impediment to having a decent pension. His recommendation is that governments should ensure sufficient mandatory minimum contributions into a funded scheme while reminding us that the UK mandatory minimum for the second pension is insufficient to provide an adequate pension.

A move to mandatory contributions (in some form) may not be untenable. Data from the HSBC Future of Retirement Global Ageing Survey (Harper and Leeson, 2007, 2008; Leeson, 2008) reveal that in the UK there is some degree of support for raising taxes, reducing state pensions, enforcing additional private savings or increasing retirement age to address the demands of ageing populations. In terms of gender specifics, it is interesting to note that increasing taxes is predominantly a male option, while increasing retirement age is predominantly a female option.

What – apart from available financial resources – influences our preparedness for retirement? Research shows that health is a defining factor in terms of choice of the timing of retirement (Leeson and Harper, 2007, 2008; Leeson, 2006). Even 10 years ago, Sterns (1998) was arguing the emergence of a paradigm shift affecting the way we invest in our future (retirement), but we are still researching to understand the drivers and barriers to retirement planning.

There is evidence too that personality constructs and financial knowledge are significant factors (Hershey and Mowen, 2000), but there is only limited psychological research to investigate pre-retirement, financial-planning decisions. From an economics point of view, on the basis of Poterba (1996), individuals can be grouped according to why they do not prepare for retirement:

• the short-sighted group: they do not save because they are unaware of the value of retirement provision
• the unlucky group: they do not save because they have lower earnings than expected or higher expenses than expected
• the spend-it-now group: they do not save because they have high discount rates and choose to consume while working at the expense of retirement consumption
• the fantasy group: they do not save because they have unrealistic expectations for their retirement income from social benefits, private pensions or other sources and for their own longevity and for their retirement consumption.

This psycho-behaviourial categorisation is confounded by other factors such as lack of education leading to negative attitudes towards saving (Bernheim et al, 1997), an overestimation of the financial robustness of retirement investment (Hershey and Wilson, 1997) and an underestimation of one’s longevity (Walsh et al, 1989). Building on this, Hershey and Mowen (2000) found that self-rated financial knowledge was positively related to perceived financial preparedness, suggesting that training and intervention could encourage financial preparation for later life; a direct relationship between future time perspective and financial preparedness, suggesting that policy messaging, education and training could increase an individual’s future orientation and therefore that individual’s propensity to prepare financially for later life.

Future time perspective receives a deal of attention as far as financial planning is concerned. A number of studies have indicated that the degree of individual orientation towards the future predicts planning and saving. In addition to the cited work by Hersjey and Mowen (2000), work by Lusardi (1999) indicates that pre-retirement a short planning horizon is linked with lower average net worth and expectations in respect of income from personal savings in retirement. Jacobs-Lawson and Hershey (2005) consider the influence of future time perspective, financial literacy and financial risk tolerance on retirement savings behaviours and find that the higher the levels of these three variables the more aggressive the savings profiles.

The evidence is that education and training for retirement would seem to be significant in respect of encouraging and enabling financial preparedness (Lusardi and Mitchell, 2007; NCEE, 2005; Hilgert and Hogarth, 2002; Australian and New Zealand Banking Group, 2005; OECD, 2005; Christelis et al, 2005; Miles, 2004).

Those more financially literate are more likely to have thought about retirement (Lusardi and Mitchell, 2006b) even when other factors are taken into account such as level of (general) education, marital status, retirement status, gender, and ethnicity. The crucial link is that lack of planning equates with lack of saving (Lusardi and Mitchell, 2006a; Lusardi, 1999; Calvert et al, 2005; Kimball and Shumway, 2006; Hilgert et al, 2003).

“Blanket” financial education may not be the answer to preparing for retirement. Moore (2003) found that individuals prefer a personalised approach to financial knowledge provision rather than collective educational initiatives. In the UK, the complexity and incomprehensibility of the pension system prevents people from making rational decisions about their own preparedness needs (Pensions Commission 2004).

According to the Pensions Commission (2005), personal private pension saving (voluntary) rather than increasing – as government would hope and desire – is declining. Of the 34 million persons of working age, almost half (15.3 million) are not contributing to a private pension (either themselves or via a partner).

So, what do we expect in retirement? What can we expect given the experience of present-day generations of retired people? Do we have choices? Are we thinking about retirement?

Evidence from Denmark (Leeson, 2006) suggests that the public debates there over the last 20 years have at least ensured that people are thinking about life after work and they are making choices. Local evidence from Scotland, however, suggests that large proportions of people are still giving little or no thought to retirement (Anderson et al, 2000). Policy makers may find little comfort in economic modeling of consumption, saving and retirement as this indicates that the whole range of individual circumstances come into play (French, 2005; Blau, 1994; Rust and Phelan, 1997).

Whatever, the demographics of the future – as outlined earlier – demand that individuals and governments face some difficult choices in their response to individual and population ageing. Both the Pensions Commission (2005) and Harper and Leeson (2007, 2008) point out that basically, there are four choices for government: increasing savings, raising taxes, reducing state pensions or increasing retirement age; and two for individuals: working longer, and/or increasing savings.

Evidence for the UK suggests a little bit of everything perhaps, but with some interesting pre- and post-retirement specifics.

So should savings for retirement be compulsory? This choice is more likely to be supported by those already in retirement (Harper and Leeson, 2008). Other survey results provide further support for the idea of compulsory savings for retirement (for example, Mintel (2005)). Alarmingly perhaps, support was lower among those not contributing to a pension.

Or should taxes be raised to finance and support the ageing population?

This choice is more likely to be supported by those approaching retirement (Harper and Leeson, 2008). Males are more likely to support this choice.

Or perhaps reducing pensions?

This is the preferred choice for only a small minority of adults both pre- and post-retirement.

Or working longer?

Working longer is the preferred choice of relatively large groups both pre- and post-retirement.

At the extremes of the preparedness spectrum, there is a group of high income earners with attractive private pension schemes adequately prepared financially for retirement, and there is a group entirely dependent on (inadequate) state provision (and family and community support). In between is the major part of the working population with some degree of preparedness but poorly equipped to understand the complexities of pension provision – this group is significantly susceptible to reaching retirement with inadequate financial provision.

This concept seems to receive some support from the Pensions Commission (2004). Those likely to retire with adequate pensions include:

• large proportions of public sector employees
• those with private sector direct benefit schemes.

Low income employees with no private provision would see increased replacement rates for state benefits if a status quo on indexation is maintained, thus protecting this group from pension erosion.

Losers will be people on average and low (but not very low) incomes with no employer pension contribution (Pensions Commission 2005).

What can be expected of future generations and their financial security in later life?

There is considerable political and economic consideration with regard to the intergenerational social contract on which many welfare models depend. In many countries, there is an increasing doubt about the robustness of pensions systems, both public and private, both with regard to the financing of these and with regard to their ability to live up to people’s welfare expectations in old age (Munell, 2002; Clark, 2003; Whiteside, 2002).

Is financial security in old age a myth of welfarism? Is it feasible to expect that universal state pension schemes (state welfarism) can provide this security? How are future generations of retirees reacting to this? Is there potential on the basis of an increased take-up of occupational pension schemes for reduced pressure on the state pension if the latter were made dependent on receipt of occupational pensions? Is there a fear among future generations in respect of their financial security in later life?

From the global ageing survey, it appears in the UK that the fear of not being able to cope financially after retirement is felt by only a relatively small proportion of pre-retirees, and the same is true for post-retirees and their financial fears for the future. Globally, 50% of pre-retirees and 58% of post-retirees are not worried. In the UK, approximately 70% of pre- and post-retirees are not worried.

The proportions of pre-retirees expecting a decline in their standard of living after retirement are modest, as are the proportions of post-retirees who find that their standard of living is worse than it was pre-retirement. Globally, the proportions expecting/experiencing a decline in standard of living are 28/34%, while in UK they are 35/21%.

As the economic climate becomes more tense there is the potential for a breakdown of the social contract between generations and between advantaged and disadvantaged that underpins welfarism. However, there is evidence globally in mature economies that financial disadvantage in later life is not something that is expected although lack of money in later life is something large proportions fear. The UK has a relatively high proportion both pre- and post-retirement fearing not having enough money. Thus, 45% pre-retirement fear not having enough money in old age, and post-retirement this proportion is 41%.

Pressure on state provision seems to be modest from the future generations of retirees (Leeson and Harper, 2008). Globally, 31% pre- and post-retirement feel that governments should bear most of the financial costs of supporting them in retirement. In the UK, the figures are 39% pre-retirement and 33% post-retirement. However, confidence in governments living up to this obligation is lower. In the UK, only 19% feel governments will bear most of the financial costs.

The usual mechanisms of government to support its ageing population, such as raising taxes, reducing state pensions or increasing retirement age are rejected globally while there is some support for some of these measures in the UK.

When given the choice of enforced additional private savings, raising taxes, reducing pensions or increasing retirement age, in the UK 18% pre-retirement feel that governments should initially enforce additional private savings to support and finance their ageing populations. This proportion increases post-retirement to 28%, and males are more inclined than females to recommend this to governments, slightly more so post-retirement. Pre-retirement, increasing taxes is the majority option for supporting ageing populations in the UK with 42% choosing this option followed by increasing retirement age (35%). Only 6% feel that the UK government should reduce pensions to finance and support the ageing population. Increasing taxes is predominantly a male option. Post-retirement, increasing retirement age is the preferred option (40%) followed by enforced additional private savings (28%) and increasing taxes (26%). Only 5% feel that the UK government should reduce pensions. Increasing retirement age is predominantly a female option.

Overall, it seem that UK citizens are saying to governments that they acknowledge the need to finance their old age; that they do not feel confident in the government doing this; and they favour taxation and an increase in retirement age followed by enforced savings as the preferred mechanisms to provide for the ageing population.

So there are some clear messages:

• there is limited apprehension about financial security in later life
• this limited apprehension is not completely and universally supported by the preparedness behaviour of the population
• there is limited expectation of government efforts to provide financial security in later life
• there is an awareness of individual responsibility for financial security in later life
• there is evidence of a psychological block and financial illiteracy in respect of financial preparedness for later life.

2.4 Family, Community and Citizenship

The demographic ageing of industrialised Western societies which has occurred during the 20^th century has affected various areas of society as well as individual behaviour, nowhere more apparent perhaps than in relation to the family (Harper, 2003), where family and social life are subject to pressure and change. Familial and social lives are constantly being transformed, and familial organisation, with kin groups pooling resources and functioning as a single coherent unit, has changed as ideological, economic and social changes have driven control from the family unit towards the individual or towards other social institutions than the family. The kin connection to property and marriage has been destabilised by the move from family- to wage-based employment, which has encouraged individual autonomy in many of these decisions (Waite et al, 2000). Urbanisation and technological change have almost revolutionised communication, social intercourse and entertainment, dramatically undermining the role of the family in this respect. Furthermore, towards the end of the 20^th century, new kin structures emerged: reconstituted or recombinant stepfamilies, ethnic minority families, single-parent families, cohabiting couples, all of which raised questions about individual roles and responsibilities within these new family structures.

In addition, societies are experiencing an ageing of some life-transitions (Harper, 2006), which, when combined with the shift from a high-mortality/high-fertility to a low-mortality/low-fertility society, have significant implications for both family structure and kinship roles (Farkas and Hogan, 1995). As populations age, the child-parent relationship moves from one of dependency to one of an adult relationship. The common experience for many parents and children is moving towards one of around 60 years of joint life, with less than a third of this time spent in a traditional parent/dependent-child relationship (Riley, 1983; Grundy, 1999). Time spent as the daughter of a parent over 65 now exceeds the time spent as the parent of a child under 18 (Watkins et al, 1987), but this should be viewed against the situation that while a high proportion of these persons aged 65 years and over previously were dependent to some degree on others, this is no longer the case. Dependence on children for help with daily living activities is now most likely to occur after age 80 (Ulhenburg, 1995). The growing significance and length of old age and grandparenthood, however, places other and additional demands on the roles and relationships of adult women in particular (Zeilig and Harper, 2000).

As family structures change, an older person in need of familial support may be faced with a complex of potential providers of support, whose familial ties vary considerably, and in this respect the role of reconstituted or step families in caring for older adults is a central issue. There is only limited research, which elucidates these phenomena (Finch and Wallis, 1994; Bornat et al, 1998; Dimmock et al, 2004; Haskey, 1998), but the suggestion is that the complexities of the ensuing relationships do not lend themselves to any particular pattern or structure of care. The dominant care relationship of blood-related daughter for mother, found within non-reconstituted families, does, however, seem to remain central. Whilst there is a growing awareness of the possibilities of looser-knit, divorce-extended families, when it comes to ‘the crunch’ the availability of care will usually depend on access to close ‘blood ties’ (Dimmock et al, 2004).

Demographic ageing has also brought with it an increasing average length of marriage for those marriages not terminated by divorce, and these marriages have been extensively studied (Bengtson et al, 1990). In addition, the child-parent dyad becomes one not of dependency but of mutual adult relationships (Riley, 1983; Grundy, 1999). Family structures have verticalized during the 20^th century (Bengtson et al, 1990; Hagestad, 1986; Dench et al, 1999) leading to intercohortal contraction and an increase in intercohortal extension (Bengtson et al, 1990) with all the implications this may have for late life care.

It is claimed that intergenerational ties in some cases strengthened towards the last decades of the 20^th century (Mendras, 1988; Dirn, 1990). Furthermore, inter-cohortal relations in relation to ageing are quite central to the social contract (Bengtson, 1993), and the question of intergenerational equity in relation to a redistribution of resources is equally central (Guillemard, 1996). Indeed, the whole issue of families and the sociology of families raises widespread interest (Newman, 1999).

Families and their roles and responsibilities have thus been challenged profoundly over the last 100 years, and are increasingly so as family structures have changed. Economic, social and even ideological shifts have shaped and threatened the accepted role of the family, both for the individual and for society.

Most certainly, the definition of what constitutes a family is now more fluid, accommodating numerous combinations of cohabitation forms and sexualities, children and stepchildren. Delayed life transitions such as marriage, birth, and leaving the parental home compress the time and space within which the family is expected to germinate and grow. From being a (lifelong) unit within which reproduction and (economic) production are concentrated, the family as a social-functional unit seems to have a much reduced role to play in the 21st century. Reproduction is at a minimum and production is the responsibility of independent individuals outside the family unit. Female labour force participation rates at all ages are approaching those of males. Dependent children and dependent adults in advanced economies are the responsibility not just of the family but of society, freeing families to some extent of the caring burden, but at the same time removing a function of family life to outside the familial sphere.

However, the changing structure of families in ageing societies does not need to mean that the supportive role of families is decreasing in importance, and in fact in many societies, the family seems to be increasing in importance in people’s lives. Comprehensive studies of the intergenerational supportive role within the family reveal the complex aspects of this phenomenon. The size and density of a social or familial network are not positively linked to support per se. Large, closely-knit families can be sources of intrusiveness, bad advice and conflict as well as support.

Since the 1960s, mean household size in the European Union has decreased in all countries (Hall, 1993) and by the late 20^th century ranged from just over 2 in Denmark to approximately 3.5 in Spain and Ireland. This development has been driven by two primary factors, namely a decline in the number of large households and an increase in the number of single-person households. The former can be related to declining fertility levels while the latter can be related to both an ageing population and the tendency for younger people to choose the single-life style. Behind this simplified statistical picture is a backdrop of complicated patterns of one-parent households, remarriage of adults with children (having their own children), consensual unions (with or without children), and maximum two-generation households.

As early as 1986, the complex changes in families and household structures and the wealth of related behavioural phenomena were summed up in the following (Burnel, 1986):

“All of these changes are associated with the arrival to adulthood of the post-Second World War generation. There seems to be a fundamental change in attitudes to life, which is not caused by political or economic factors peculiar to a region or social background. There would seem to be a major transformation affecting all advanced countries, irrespective of their social and regional structure, and the movement is universal, causes are therefore deep-seated, common to all the Western countries and capable of changing mentalities.”

In historical terms, marriage is the institution that establishes families and provides the human framework within which reproduction begins. However, in true Malthusian fashion, younger people across Europe since the 1960s have been delaying their entry into marriage – though not necessarily into cohabitation – and at the same time marriage rates have been declining. However, perhaps the one single dominant factor driving much of this fertility and marriage related behaviour has been the influx of women into the labour market, bringing in its wake the increased independence of women in partnerships.

It is clear from the above discourse that the family is not a constant phenomenon over time or over different individuals. There are inherent and potentially significant differences with regard to family structure, family size and family function. It is often assumed that older people without children are more disadvantaged with respect to familial support than older people with children, but this simplistic assumption excludes the potential supportive contribution from other members of an individual’s familial and social network (siblings, friends and neighbours, for example). However, the family as an institution may have more than a purely practical supportive function, and its importance may therefore not necessarily be determined by the willingness or capability of family members to provide support in some shape or form.

The Global Ageing Survey reveals that across the globe the family remains strong in defining who we are and we still feel high levels of obligation and responsibility to our family members. Furthermore, the contribution of people in later life to the family is vital.

So in the UK, approximately 70% across the 40-79 year cohorts of GLAS state family as the main thing they think of when they think of who they are, making the family the main factor of personal identification. Our duty towards our families is as manifest as our personal identification with our families. Around 70% of respondents in the UK feel that it is the duty of adults to provide for their parents (in-law) in times of need later in life. In addition, approximately 80 per cent in each cohort feel that it is the duty of a parent to do his/her best for his/her children even at the expense of their own well-being, and around 80% feel that it is the duty of grandparents to be there for their grandchildren in times of difficulty. There is significantly less support for grandparents contributing to the economic security of the family with only 25% of the youngest cohort rising to 47% of the oldest cohort feeling that this should be the case.

Our family commitment also extends to actively supporting and helping family members. Large proportions of the over 50s are indeed providing financial support, practical help and even personal care within the family and the proportions providing are greater than the proportions receiving, indicating a simple positive balance of support in their favour.

In respect of practical support during the previous 6 months, in the UK between 24% of the 70-79 year olds and 49% of the 50-59 year olds have provided support to a relative or friend. The proportions receiving practical support from a relative or friend are more modest ranging from 15% of the 50-69 year olds to 23% of the 70-79 year olds. Between 5% of the 70-79 year olds and 17%of the 40-49 year olds have provided personal care, with 2-4% of the cohorts receiving this form of support.

While there may be an expectation of family involvement and identification, this need not be the case in respect of the wider community, and yet it is this community identification and involvement that in many ways fundamentally defines citizenship – an activity, an involvement beyond the personal and familial.

Community involvement is substantial among the over 50s as we witness the development of the concept of life after retirement towards a time of responsibility, a time of pay-back. In the UK, the organised voluntary contribution to communities from the 40-79 year old cohorts ranges from 30% of the 40-49 year olds to 38% of the 70-79 year olds. In addition, others have been involved (but are not involved at present) in this form of voluntary work, ranging from 17% of the 40-49 year olds to 23% of the 70-79 year olds. The average number of hours per week ranges from 3.5 hours for the 40-49 year olds to 4 hours for the 50-59 year olds to 4.5 hours for the 60-69 year olds and to 5.2 hours for the 70-79 year olds, and in terms of the economic contribution of the voluntary engagement of the two oldest cohorts to the national economy of the UK, these figures correspond to a contribution of almost 18 million hours per week, and more than £4 billion to the UK national economy on an annual basis.

But in addition, there is also evidence from the research of an engagement in a wide variety of activities, both learning activities and activities of a socially interactive nature (Leeson, 2005a; Leeson et al, 2004), but in order to realise the contribution at both the individual and community level, there is a need for skills development provided by late life and lifelong learning.

A number of interesting issues arise from the research in this area.

The family and the broader social network are important factors in defining identity.

Network building blocks are available for most individuals – few have no surviving family or friends. There is a wealth of intergenerational, intrafamilial contact and support both up and down the generations with larger proportions of the over 50s giving than receiving.

Community involvement is widespread and on an impressive scale both in terms of numbers and contribution to the wider economy.

3. Age integration or age segregation?

Let us conclude by considering two (likely) scenarios which will impact not only on the individual and society, but also on lifelong and later life education and training. Basically, we propose two simple scenarios for the UK 2050, which can be regarded as diametrically opposite in respect of the ageing of our population. These are:

1. Age segregation – large proportions of people have continued to retire early. This will in itself, as we have seen with regard to financial preparedness, result in a polarised segment of the population in later life. On the one hand, those who are poorly secured financially and on the other hand, those with adequate, even extremely adequate, pension provision. The unprepared and unsecured group will have no plans and no inclination or resources to contribute to their community or to broader society. They become an embarrassing burden, despised and dismissed by their wealthier peers and by younger generations who see themselves as financing this inactive, non-contributory group who will be in poorer health. They will be subject to age segregation, taking no part in the functioning of society.

The prepared and secure group, however, will have planned their later life (with their partner and family) and as well as being able to enjoy their later life as they wish, they will be responsible and inclined to contribute (pay-back time) overwhelmingly, but not exclusively, in a voluntary context. They will be active and seek out education and training, mostly to fulfil their own desires, and although they too are subject to age segregation, they will not seriously be affected by this.

1. Age integration – over a period of 40 years, citizens have reaped the benefits of programmes for lifelong and later life education and training, empowering them and enabling them to function as full, equal and active citizens in a society which works as a collective while optimising individuality. All generations in 2050 contribute and are responsible – in the workplace, the family, the community.

The programmes which have brought about the change in scenario 2 have been developed from the Danish folk high school tradition (Leeson, 2004).

Danish Folk High Schools:

Danish Folk High Schools are independent, adult boarding schools (although Day High Schools do exist too) offering general subject courses including history, the arts, music, sports, philosophy, theatre, photography etc. There are 83 Folk High Schools of which four are specifically for older people (old age pensioners). The philosophy of the Folk High School is to combine vocational education with personal and social experiences. The duration of courses ranges from one week to 10 months. Students must be over 17.5 years old at the commencement of the course.

The idea of Folk High Schools dates back to 1836 when Grundtvig advocated the establishment of Folk High Schools. A few years prior to this, he had already campaigned for a new kind of school. Grundtvig’s ideas were radical indeed. He envisaged a people’s university where all could learn – civil servants alongside peasants, practitioners and theorists on the same school bench, a true interaction between the elite of society and commoners. Students should through studying history and poetry become aware of themselves as a part of something bigger – the Danish People. In many ways, the first seeds of the Danish welfare state were sewn in Grundtvig’s ideas.

In fact, the first Folk High School opened in 1844 in Roedding in Slesvig-Holsten, which is now a part of Germany. The establishment of Folk High Schools surprisingly pre-dates the free, democratic constitution in Denmark (1849), and by 1851 the Danish State was providing financial support to the schools.

Folk High Schools spread across Denmark but also Norway (1864), Sweden (1868) and Finland (1889) took on the idea.

In Denmark, the development of the Folk High School movement runs parallel with other democratic developments in the country – the co-operative movement (farmers) and the establishment of the Social Democratic Party in 1871 (workers). In just 26 years, the number of Folk High Schools in Denmark had reached 52, rising to 75 by 1890. With such a large number of Folk High Schools across the country, the Association of Danish Folk High Schools was established in 1891 and encompasses agricultural schools too (not surprising in view of the close democratic links with the co-operative movement).

The first Folk High Schools for senior citizens were opened in 1971 when the agricultural schools split from the movement.

With over 100 schools at the beginning of the 1990s, the movement has been hit by a number of factors in the last decade – increasing difficulty in attracting younger people, declining subsidies – and today there are 83 schools according to the Association.

Adult Education Associations:

As mentioned above, numerous local, regional and national adult education associations across the country provide a wide-ranging number of courses.

Let us exemplify this development by considering a single case-study: AOF (Workers’ Education Association).

AOF was established in 1924 by the Danish Social Democratic Party, among others, and on its establishment 56 trade unions immediately joined the cause, so to speak. The first major activity of AOF was a national series of 953 lectures attended by almost 60,000 persons, followed by study groups and workshops and the emergence of evening schools. In 1925, AOF began to receive financial support from the State, and by 1929, AOF had developed from a national to a local movement comprising 90 local associations of which 32 also offered evening school activities.

In 1930, legislation was passed granting state financial support to evening schools and in 1932 it was decided by government that mainstream school facilities be made available to evening schools and study groups under the Adult Education Associations.

There was a boom in participation after 1938 when Holiday Legislation was passed – workers could now take part in courses during their holidays. New legislation on financial support from the State was passed in 1942 and evening high schools were allowed. In the 1950s legislation relating to the education of workplace workers’ representatives opened up a new field of activity.

In the mid 1970s, AOF comprised 175 local associations, and by 1978, over 500,000 persons were participating annually in the courses they were offering.

Adult education in general:

In 2002, 95,000 year-participants took part in public financed adult education courses (a year-participant corresponds to 925 hours of teaching). This indicates a decline in activity over recent years – a decrease of 5% in relation to the 2001 (5000 year-participants). In addition, 30,000 year-participants took part in local authority supported evening school courses (under the Folk Education Legislation). Thus, in 2002, a total of 125,000 year-participants took part in supported adult education courses. There are also private adult education courses available.

It is estimated (Ministry of Education, 2003) that these figures translate to a total of 400,000 persons taking part to some degree in adult education (including vocational training).

Just over 5000 of these year-participants attended a Folk High School – decline of more than 30% since the mid 1990s. This is due to smaller generations of young people, a number of schools lost their support from public funds, plus it has become more difficult for unemployed persons to attend Folk High Schools since legislation from 1996 was introduced.

State, county authority and local authority expenditure in this field in 2002 amounted to 6.4 billion DKK, which corresponds to approximately 10% of the total public expenditure on education (excluding costs of student grants etc). From 1993 to 1998, this expenditure increased by 40%, but from 1998 to 2001 they have declined by 20%.

Generally speaking, the majority of participants are female – for example, 60% of Folk High School students are female. In all types of courses, persons aged 60 years and over constitute less than 20%

Providers of adult education are Folk High Schools, local, regional and national associations, trade unions, agricultural bodies, industry, and private organisations. There are national networks for most of these groupings, which represent the interests of the member providers in relation to local, regional and central governments.

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Continuing mortality improvements at older ages

Mortality rates in the UK are declining at all ages and for both sexes, just as they are in the rest of the developed world. With every year that passes, there is an increase in the proportion of successive birth cohorts that reaches retirement age, and an increase in the likelihood of surviving to enjoy that retirement for several years. Declining mortality at older ages is one of the main drivers of the growth in the relative size of the older population. By 2025 one in five people in the UK population will be aged 65 years or more. By 2050 it will be almost one in four.

Since most deaths now occur in later life, it is the continuing improvement in late life mortality that is contributing most to increasing life expectancy at birth. Over the last 20 years in the UK, male life expectancy at birth has increased by 5.6 years, ie at an average rate of more than three months per year, with most of the gain accruing to men past the age of retirement. Four of those additional life years have been added to life expectancy at the age of 65. Death rates in older men have not only fallen sharply in this time – by almost one half in the 60-69 age group and one third in the 70-79 age group – and from relatively high levels, but the decline in death rates has actually been accelerating, which accounts for the more or less linear increase in life expectancy. The average annual rate of improvement between 2000 and 2005 was twice as high as it was in the late 1980s. Death rates among older women have followed a similar trend, though the gains have been not quite so large.

Is this pattern of accelerating mortality improvements apparent in the data for the oldest-old – the population aged, say, over 80 years – as well as for people in their 60s or 70s? For men aged 80 to 90 years, it seems that it is, but not for men in their 90s, or indeed for women in either the 80-89 age group or the 90-99 age group (Pensions Commission, 2005). However, contrary to the expectations of some analysts writing in the 1980s and 1990s, there is no sign yet of a stagnation in mortality gains among the oldest segment of the population, certainly not in the UK (or Japan or France), nor even of a slowdown in the rate of improvement. Clearly then, there is no evidence in these data for the view that life expectancy in affluent countries is approaching any kind of limit, let alone the limit of 85 years estimated by Fries (1980) and reaffirmed by Carnes and Olshansky (2007).

It is these recent trends in mortality that form the basis of current official forecasts for future life expectancy, and they have been sufficiently striking to prompt the Government Actuary’s Department (GAD) to change its assumptions about the trajectory of future mortality improvements. Where the 2000-based projections assumed that annual improvements in mortality rates would converge toward ½% at each age for both males and females by the year 2032, the latest forecasts reckon that annual rates of improvement will converge to 1% for most age groups, which is equivalent to the average annual rate of improvement for the 20^th century.

Earlier forecasts were further shaped by the assumption of an eventual slowdown in mortality improvements, which has now been dropped. Hence we find that forecasts of future life expectancy have been revised upwards both in the medium term and in the longer term. Over the next twenty years female life expectancy at age 65 is forecast to grow even more quickly than it has done over the last 20 years (3.4 yrs as against 2.6); and there will be only a slight dip in the rate of increase for men over the same period (3.6 years as against 4 years). Thereafter the projected trend in mortality improvements entails a marked slowdown (and convergence) in the rate of increase for both sexes. Between 2028 and 2048 life expectancy at age 65 years will increase by 1.8 years for men and 1.7 years for women.

Variations and inequalities in mortality risk

The gender gap in life expectancy is narrowing

The life expectancy of a 65 year old woman in the UK is now 19.7 years, almost 3 years longer than that of a 65 year old man. It is not surprising, then, that among the oldest age groups in the population (eg 85 years+) women outnumber men by more than two to one, nor that nine out of every ten centenarians in this country are female.

Over the course of the 20^th century, in common with most other developed countries, the gender gap in life expectancy in the UK first widened, and then in the 1970s and 1980s started to narrow (Gjonca et al, 2005). Mortality rates for men are falling faster than mortality rates for women. If these trends continue, which is what GAD expects, the ratio of men to women in the older population will of course increase, and this means that an increasing proportion of older women will have surviving husbands. Japan and Russia are notable exceptions to this pattern (ie the sex gap in life expectancy has increased over the last 20 years). In Japan, the widening gap appears against a background of improving life expectancy for both sexes whereas in the Russian Federation life expectancy has actually declined.

Social inequalities in life expectancy are widening

One of the most notable features of recent trends in mortality in affluent countries is that a pattern of international convergence in life expectancy overlays a pattern of widening within-country variation of age at death, much of which is thought to be explained by socioeconomic differences in mortality risk (Edwards and Tuljapurkar, 2005). In the UK, as in most of Europe (Mackenbach et al, 2003) and the US (Meara et al, 2008) over the last couple of decades, the increase in life expectancy has been accompanied by widening socio-economic inequalities in mortality . Although mortality rates have been decreasing at both ends of the social scale, they have been decreasing much more quickly in the upper socio-economic groups.

Here in the UK, data from the ONS Longitudinal Study show that, in the years between 1972-5 and 2002-5, the gap in life expectancy at age 65 between men in manual and non-manual occupations doubled from 1 to 2 years. The gap between men in the highest and lowest of the Registrar General’s occupational classes now stands at 4.2 years, with unskilled manual workers having more or less the same life expectancy at pensionable age (14 years) as professionals did in 1972-5 (ONS, 2006). The trends for women are the same.

A similar pattern is apparent in analyses of deaths in the British Regional Heart Study (Ramsay et al, 2007), as well as in many studies of trends in geographical inequalities in mortality. Although the risk of premature mortality (< 75 yrs) has declined everywhere in the UK over the last 25 years, the difference between the authorities with the highest and lowest probabilities of surviving beyond 75 has increased (Wells and Gordon 2008). A similar conclusion is reached by Leyland et al (2004), though he uses a lower threshold to define premature mortality (< 65 years). Between 1979 and 1998, premature mortality decreased by 36% in Great Britain as a whole. Over the same period inequalities in the risk of premature mortality increased not only between regions, but also within most regions of the country. The excess premature mortality associated with living, for example, in London increased from 14% to 19%.

Changes in cause-specific mortality

One common factor in analyses of trends in cause-specific mortality over the last half-century, not only in the UK, but in all of the developed world, is the contribution of declining mortality from cardiovascular/circulatory diseases to overall mortality decline. It has been estimated, for example, that reduced CVD mortality contributed more than 5 of the 8.8 years added to life expectancy at birth in the USA since the middle of the 20^th century (Cutler, 2004). In the USA, as in the UK, it is the decline in mortality from heart disease that has contributed most of the decline in CVD mortality – mainly because a much larger proportion of deaths were (and still are) caused by heart disease than by stroke.

In the UK, over the last ten years (1995-2005), the age-standardised mortality rate for CHD fell from 94 to 48 per 100,000; with death rates falling by about one half in both the 55-64 year age group and the 65-74 age group. If these trends were to continue, we could expect to see the end of premature mortality from CHD. Whether or not that will happen over the next few decades is unclear. A recent analysis of trends in CHD mortality in younger adults – they appear to be flattening out – suggests that increases in obesity may be starting to offset the decline in other risk factors among younger cohorts (O’Flaherty et al, 2008).

For the other main cause of death in the UK, cancer, the picture is quite different, and more complicated. Taken as a whole, age-standardised mortality from cancer changed very little in the second half of the 20^th century (Quinn et al, 2001), although more recently, mortality rates have declined substantially (10-15%) among both men and women (Westlake and Cooper, 2008). Cancer incidence, however, declined by only 1% between 1993 and 2004, and it actually increased among women (with breast cancer accounting for much of the increase). For men, the main source of the downward pressure on cancer mortality is the fall in mortality from lung cancer, and this is due to declining incidence. With breast cancer in women and prostate cancer in men, on the other hand, the drop in mortality has occurred in spite of increasing incidence.

Increasing healthy life expectancy

In the early 1970s it was feared that a combination of increasing longevity and the intractability of the major degenerative diseases of later life would lead to an expansion of morbidity (eg Gruenberg, 1977). If gains in life expectancy at older ages were being driven mainly by the increasing capabilities of medicine to postpone death in people with serious illness, then the average person should expect to spend more years living with a heavy burden of disease and disability. What is now clear is that age-related disease is not as intractable as was then supposed. There are established and effective strategies to reduce the risk of onset for many kinds of chronic disease as well as effective interventions to delay the progression of disease and minimise associated disability. There is also growing evidence that the onset of age-related ill health and disability is in fact being postponed to older ages across whole populations. What is being postponed, in other words, is the need for medical intervention to deal with the more serious problems of age-related disease and disability. At least this is what seems to be happening in some developed countries and for some forms of age-related disease and disability.

There are distinct questions to ask here. We can ask, for example, whether or not the number of years that we can expect to spend in a healthy (or active) state is increasing. We can also ask whether it is increasing as fast as life expectancy. Or is it increasing even faster, which would mean that there is a compression of the time spent in serious ill-health or disability at the end of life?

The evidence for ongoing improvements in healthy life expectancy in the UK (ie the first question) is now quite strong. Or at least this is the case for cardiovascular disease, which is, after all, not only the main cause of death in later life but also a major cause of late-life disability. Trend data for the age-specific incidence of disease (eg first coronary attacks or first strokes) confirm that the average age of onset is climbing up (Davies, 2007; Rothwell, 2004). Estimates of the relative contribution of medical care and changing levels of population risk factors to declining mortality from CHD tell the same story, though from a slightly different angle. The kind of evidence that can give us a more rounded picture of health status is, however, more equivocal. Data from the General Household Survey, for example, on self-perceived health suggest that we are keeping our health for longer (although it seems that increases in healthy life expectancy are not keeping pace with improving life expectancy). There is, on the other hand, quite a lot of evidence to suggest that the prevalence of chronic disease and related health problems is increasing in the older population, and this is not just because the older population is itself ageing. A recent analysis of the MRC CFAS dataset found that the prevalence of chronic disease is increasing in successive cohorts of the younger-old (65-69 years), though it is admittedly very difficult to be sure that most of this change cannot be explained by improved detection and earlier engagement with medical care (Jagger et al, 2007).

The evidence on trends in late-life disability is, if anything, even more problematic. Although there are some affluent countries which do show clear evidence of favourable trends in late-life disability (often in spite of an increasing prevalence of self-reported health problems and diseases), the UK is not one them (Lafortune et al, 2007). And since there is no firm evidence for increasing disability-free life expectancy in the UK, there can be no firm evidence to suggest that the functional status of the older population is improving enough to bring about a compression of disability.

Key uncertainties and potential discontinuities in longevity trends

Demographic uncertainty

Demographic forecasters make errors, not because their methods are inadequate to the task in hand, but rather because the future trajectory of mortality is inherently uncertain. We may be confident, and reasonably so, that mortality rates in the older population will continue to decline over the 20 years, but we cannot be so sure of the accuracy of our estimate for the average annual rate of improvement, that it will be 2%, for example, rather than 1.5% or 2.5%. GAD, which for many decades has persistently under-estimated mortality improvements in the older population, captures some of the uncertainty in forecasts of life expectancy through its use of variant projections. Since the likelihood of forecasting error increases with the length of the projection period, the gap between the high and low variant forecasts for life expectancy increases over the course of the century. In the 2006-based projections, there is a 2.6 year gap in 2025 between the upper and lower estimates for life expectancy at birth for men; by 2050 it opens up to 8 years (and for women it increases from 1.6 years to 6.3 years). Although the trend line for the principal projection lies of course between these limits, GAD’s current methodology gives us no mathematical handle on the probability that it will in fact fall within that range. All we can say is that it most probably will (and, of course, that the future is more likely to correspond to the principal projection than to either of the variants).

It seems very unlikely, for example, that life expectancy will start to decline after 2038, which is the boundary set by the low variant forecast (ie it assumes that life expectancy remains constant after that date). But it is not altogether inconceivable that it might start to fall some time between 2025 and 2050, and precisely this outcome has been assigned to a worst-case scenario for the obesity ‘epidemic’ in the USA (Olshanksy et al, 2005). Nor does it take much casting around to find other potential causes of such an outcome, such as a catastrophically bad influenza pandemic. As for the high variant forecast, this corresponds quite closely to a continuation of the more or less linear trend in improvements in life expectancy noted by Oeppen and Vaupel (2002) for a times series of data from so-called ‘best practice’ countries. If, however, we assumed that the trend in life expectancy projected for the UK for the next 20 years were to continue up to 2050 (ie an average annual increase of about 3 months per year), then life expectancy at birth in 2050 would exceed the high variant forecast. Once again this may be an unlikely outcome, but it is not altogether inconceivable.

Optimists and pessimists

We cannot be sure that future changes in mortality rates will be the same as those we have seen in the recent past, but unless we have any reason to think otherwise, our best bet is to assume that they will. This may be a good rule-of-thumb, but when it comes to deciding on its application to the future of human mortality in the 21^st century, it leaves some important basic issues unresolved. In particular, there is the question whether we have good reason to think that future changes in mortality rates will not be the same as those we have seen in the recent past. And this question may in turn be asked in various ways depending on which stretch of the recent past we are considering for extrapolation into the future. Do we have any reason to think that gains in life expectancy in the 21^st century will be less than those seen in the 20^th century? Do we have any reason to think that the pattern of gains in life expectancy seen in the UK over the last 20 years will not continue? More generally, we can ask whether we have any reason to think that the rate of mortality improvements at older ages is more likely to slow down than continue on its present trajectory. The kinds of answers that demographers and experts on human mortality give to these questions may be divided into four broad categories. At the extremes there are two scenarios which ‘foresee’ a fairly radical departure from recent trends, or at least they argue that such a discontinuity is much more likely than most demographic forecasters are inclined to suppose.

The pessimistic scenario assumes that the increasing prevalence of obesity in cohorts that are still relatively young or in middle age will have a very substantial impact on their mortality in later life, large enough in fact to reverse the long-term trend in life expectancy. We are to suppose that the full impact of obesity on mortality will turn out to be not very different from the impact of smoking on mortality. What distinguishes this particular pessimistic scenario from the risk of catastrophes that hit us, as it were, ‘out of the blue’, is the availability of evidence on current trends in obesity as well as estimates of the impact of obesity on mortality, which together enable a projection to be made. The basis for the scenario, in other words, is found in present trends. What makes it an especially pessimistic scenario (rather than a merely realistic assessment of the likely impact of obesity on life expectancy) is (i) the choice of the most pessimistic of the range of current estimates of the relative mortality risk associated with obesity and overweight, and (ii) a likely under-estimate of the effect of countervailing changes in lifestyle, especially the decline in smoking prevalence.

At the other extreme there is what we might call a super-optimistic scenario, which reckons on our ability to develop and apply the means of overcoming whatever limits the process of biological ageing puts to human longevity soon enough to have an impact on the evolution of human longevity in this century. Should this happen, then (so the argument goes) we should expect to see a rapid acceleration in gains in life expectancy, and there is no reason why the average age at death should not exceed the maximum observed human lifespan (approximately 125 years) before the end of the century. What makes this a super-optimistic scenario is that it offers us a reason to think that the future trends in mortality will depart quite radically from historical trends. The gains in mortality that would be required to achieve this scenario exceed anything that could be derived from the extrapolation of current trends.

Even among the majority of demographers who would reject these ‘extreme’ scenarios as highly unlikely, there remain important differences of opinion on the question whether life expectancy in affluent countries is approaching a limit; and if it is, whether this has any relevance for attempts to forecast the short- to medium-term future for mortality. For the sake of simplicity, and following Carnes and Olshansky (2007), they may be divided into realists, who argue that the rate of mortality improvements is more likely to slow down than continue on its present trajectory, and optimists, who forcefully reject the idea that we have any reason to suppose that this will happen in the foreseeable future.

The difference in practical terms between realists and optimists is large. Where Carnes and Olshansky think that combined life expectancy is unlikely to exceed 85 years, Oeppen and Vaupel (2002) puts it at 100 years by the end of the century. The key to this difference lies in differing assessments of the relevance of what is known about the ageing process to the assumptions that demographers make about the future of mortality. Carnes and Olshansky (2007) argue that humans, like other organisms, “are subject to the biological equivalent of a warranty period”. This is not to say that we cannot survive beyond our ‘warranty period’; the point is rather that the probability of death increases sharply the longer we survive beyond it. What the optimists dispute in this is not just the rate at which the probability of dying increases in later life, or the estimate of the ‘warranty period’ for humans, or indeed whether the idea of a warranty period is at all useful. The fundamental division of opinion turns on the question whether the constraints that biological ageing imposes on human longevity are going to become apparent in the mortality data soon enough at least to influence the assumptions of demographic forecasters.

Convergent or divergent trends in differential mortality risk?

Will social inequalities in life expectancy continue to increase?

Uncertainty about what is going to happen to social differentials in mortality risk is presumably at least as great as the uncertainty about overall trends in future mortality. If we suppose that there are practical limits to life expectancy which rich countries like the UK are fast approaching, then we would expect soon to see a slowdown in the rate of increase in the mean age at death and a compression of mortality around the mean (Fries 1980). In effect, most of the future increase in the mean would be achieved by a narrowing of social inequalities in mortality. It is assumed, on this view, that the benefits for life expectancy of good early life nutrition and healthy living have been more or less fully realised by a substantial minority of the population. Future cohorts in similar circumstances may still gain more in this way, but not much. There is, however, still a large gap to be closed between them and the rest.

The problem with this view, however, is that it is not supported by the evidence. To be sure, GAD forecasts a slowdown in the rate of increase in life expectancy between 2025 and 2050, and this may be accompanied by a compression of mortality (and a narrowing of social differentials). As we have already noted, however, current trends in social differentials provide no evidence for this. Quite the contrary. And this is despite a considerable effort on the part of government to do something about it. If we decided to follow, for this particular case, GAD’s standard approach to projection, we would presumably forecast a further widening of social inequalities in mortality. Given the determination of government to reverse this trend, the question we have to ask is this: how confident can we be that government efforts to narrow social inequalities in mortality will be successful before 2025 or 2050? Or should we suppose that they will be no more successful over the next 20 years than they have been over the last 10 or 15?

The future of the gender gap in life expectancy

The gender gap in life expectancy decreases by about 20% in GAD’s principal projection for 2050, and by more than a third in the high variant. Only in the low variant does it actually increase. If we take the high and low variants as the outer limits for likely outcomes, then the gender gap in life expectancy could be anywhere between 2.4 and 4.2 years by 2050. It is worth noting, moreover, that the continuing decrease seen in the principal projection happens in spite of an assumed convergence between male and female rates of mortality improvements: gains in female life expectancy will accelerate as gains for men will slow down (ie without this assumption the convergence would be much greater).

Since male-female life expectancy fails to converge only in the low variant forecast, it is perhaps worth asking how unlikely it is that we will have much greater gains in life expectancy than are forecast in this variant along with a lack of convergence in male and female life expectancy. The point has already been made that GAD’s methodology does not allow us to assign a number to the probability of this kind of outcome. However, as with Olshansky’s pessimistic scenario for the impact of obesity on future trends in life expectancy or Vaupel’s best-bet forecast of linear increases in high-performing countries, such an outcome does not seem so unlikely as to fall outside the limits of serious consideration (wherever they are).

Are we on the verge of an epidemic of frailty?

Just as there are optimists and pessimists about the future of mortality over the next few decades, so also are there optimists and pessimists about the likelihood of achieving a compression of morbidity (or disability) when life expectancy is continuing to increase by more than two months per year. Although current trends in old-age disability in the USA give grounds for optimism, here in the UK they look less favourable (Lafortune, 2007).

Even in the USA, however, it would be unwise for policy-makers to discount the risk of a slowdown in current rates of improvement in the prevalence of disability. Nor is it sufficient that disability rates continue to decline for there to be no expansion of disability (ie the amount of time that the average person spends in a disabled state at the end of life). If future increases in life expectancy outpace future increases in active (or disability-free) life expectancy, there will be an expansion of disability. The prospects for a compression of disability depend, therefore, not only on what happens to disability rates, but also on what happens to life expectancy. An increase in the prevalence of disability may look unlikely on current trends, but there is a risk, for example, that the effects of obesity will be sufficient to reverse them; and there is also the risk that gains in life expectancy at older ages exceed the current ‘best estimate’ of forecasters.

Useful as it is, however, to make this kind of broad distinction between a future compression of disability and a future expansion of disability, there are other possible scenarios for the evolution of the relationship between increasing life expectancy and increasing active life expectancy. It is possible, for example, that increases in active life expectancy will keep pace with increasing life expectancy, so that there will be neither a compression nor an expansion of disability.

It is also important to take proper account of the distinction between more and less severe states of ill-health and disability. If we suppose that current gains in life expectancy are strongly dependent on improvements in the secondary prevention of fatal chronic disease in later life, then although we should expect an expansion of morbidity, this will result from an expansion of the time spent with relatively mild and ‘manageable’ health problems, not from an expansion of time spent in a severely disabled or seriously ill condition.

The original prediction of an imminent compression of morbidity (Fries 1980) was based on the conjunction of two hypotheses: firstly, that the main driver of the current gains in life expectancy at older ages was an underlying improvement in health which has enabled people to remain free of potentially fatal chronic disease for longer; and secondly, that life expectancy was approaching its limit. As we have seen, there is no evidence yet of a slowdown in gains in life expectancy. Even, therefore, if the first hypothesis is right, there is no reason in theory to predict a compression of morbidity in the foreseeable future unless we also predict a slowdown in gains in life expectancy.

Suppose, then, as seems quite likely, that most of the current gains in life expectancy at older ages are due to a combination of improved secondary prevention of fatal chronic disease and underlying improvements in health. Can we be reasonably confident that if this is true, there will be no expansion of (severe) disability? According to Manton et al (1991), and the hypothesis that increasing life expectancy is in a state of ‘dynamic equilibrium’ with morbidity and disability in later life, we can. Not everyone, however, would agree. A good deal turns on the relationship between patterns of delayed onset and progression for different categories of chronic degenerative disease. If age-specific patterns of risk for the major fatal chronic diseases of later life (eg circulatory disease) are changing faster than the patterns of risk for severely disabling but non-fatal conditions, then the prospect of extended survival is likely to expose individuals to an increasing risk of disabling and age-related functional loss.

How longevity trends intersect with developments in

The drivers of mortality decline

“Gains in longevity are the result of a complex array of changes (standards of living, public health, personal hygiene, and medical care), with different factors playing major or minor roles in different time periods” (Wilmoth, 2000). Most analysts would accept that medicine made a relatively small contribution to declining mortality until the second half of the century, or perhaps even as late as the 1970s, after which it started to make a big difference (Bunker, 2001). It seems clear, for example, that the secondary prevention of heart disease through more effective medication and improved surgical techniques has had a substantial impact on the mortality of people with diagnosed heart disease (Jeune, 2007), and they are, after all, a large proportion of the older population. Whether or not medical interventions have contributed more to declining mortality over the last 20 years than social change or lifestyle change is not so clear. Certainly for heart disease there is an impressive body of analysis which argues that improvements in medical care account for less than half the decline in mortality in recent decades (Unal et al, 2004), though a rather different view of the impact of medical intervention emerges from some recent analyses of the contribution of pharmaceutical innovation to mortality decline (Lichtenberg, 2007).

What is at issue in these different estimates is the balance between the various components in the array of forces driving down mortality in the recent past, and even if we were to suppose this issue settled, we would still have to consider how this balance might change in the foreseeable future. There are two broad questions we might ask here. Firstly, how much life expectancy can we expect to gain in rich societies without the ever more intensive application of expensive medical interventions? Secondly, should we expect over the next few decades an increase in the life expectancy gains made as a result of the widespread application of biomedical innovation (and if so, how)?

Social change and changing lifestyles

The question of how much life expectancy we can expect to gain in rich societies without the intensive application of new medical technologies has been tackled in various ways. One approach involves an assessment of the impact of the increasing diffusion of what Carey (2003) calls ‘healthful living’ on mortality. Although Carey himself argues that social and lifestyle change probably has a rather small and diminishing contribution to make to future longevity gains, there are others who take quite a different view. The effects of the continuing recession of the 20^th century smoking epidemic may be the most obvious candidate for this kind of exercise, but there are of course other factors besides smoking which have a measurable impact on mortality risk. It has been estimated, for example, that a modest reduction in risk factor levels for CHD in the general population could reduce CHD deaths in the UK by nearly one half within a policy-relevant time frame (Kelly and Capewell, 2004). An alternative approach would be to estimate the effects on population life expectancy of the elimination or narrowing of social inequalities in mortality. What would happen, for example, to population life expectancy if standardised mortality ratios for the lowest income groups were the same as those for the highest (Manton et al, 1990)? More generally, we could assess the impact of narrowing the gap in life expectancy by eg 50% or 75%.

The role of smoking

Smoking is the single largest cause of preventable deaths in the UK (Davy, 2007), accounting for approximately one in six of all adult deaths in England in 1998-2002 (Health Development Agency, 2004). Since the gap in life expectancy at birth between the average non-smoker and the lifelong smoker is estimated at about 10 years (Doll et al, 2004), it not surprising that smoking should be widely regarded as the largest single determinant of the substantial variations in mortality that are found (i) between men and women (see eg Pampel, 2003), (ii) between different socioeconomic groups (see eg Law and Morris, 1998), and (iii) between different geographical areas (see eg Mackenbach et al, 2008). It is hard to exaggerate the importance attached by many demographers and epidemiologists to smoking behaviour in explaining changing patterns of mortality in the developed world in the second half of the 20^th century.

Smoking patterns that appear early in life of a cohort have very large effects on mortality several decades later. In many countries the spread of smoking in cohorts born at the beginning of the 20^th century acted as a substantial drag on the mortality declines that might have been expected from post-war improvements in living standards and health care (Janssen et al, 2007). As the smoking epidemic recedes, we should therefore similarly expect an acceleration of mortality declines in places where the proportion of smokers in cohorts reaching later life continues to fall. There are good reasons, therefore, to think that the continuing decline in smoking prevalence is likely to be one of the main drivers of gains in life expectancy in the developed world over the next 50 years.

Human and physiological capital

There are two other potentially important sources of continuing gains in life expectancy which are largely (but not entirely) independent of innovation in biomedical technology; firstly education, and secondly what economist Robert Fogel (2003) has called the accumulation of ‘physiological capital’.

The idea that improvements in the general level of education in society is a important driver of increasing life expectancy has its origins, partly in the well-established link between socioeconomic status and differential mortality risk, and partly in the idea that higher levels of education are associated with an increased ability to negotiate the challenges and hazards of modern life in a highly urbanised and technologically-oriented society (ie more ‘know-how’). What is gained from more education is not just a higher standard of living. Better educated individuals are more in control of their lives, which means inter alia that they are more in control of the various factors in the social and material environment which influence their own health status (Cutler et al, 2006).

The idea that the accumulation of ‘physiological capital’ early in life has large benefits for late-life health and mortality builds on the now familiar idea that nutrition in utero and in early childhood has a substantial and long-lasting impact on health via their influence on the formation of essential physical structures in the developing organism (Barker, 1995). As a result of improved nutrition in early life, more recent cohorts in the developed world are not only better able to resist infectious disease than their parents and grandparents, but also benefit from a delay in the onset of the chronic diseases that cause ill-health and death later in life. One of the key pieces of evidence to which Fogel appeals in developing these views is trend data on birth weights and adult heights. Essentially we are getting taller – which is a good marker for the improved development of internal organ systems – and there is, he thinks, a demonstrable link between adult height and mortality risk (see eg Langenberg et al, 2005). The fact there is no evidence of any deceleration in this particular trend, certainly in Europe, suggests furthermore that we should expect no weakening in the force of this source of mortality reductions (Fogel and Costa, 1997). At the very least, we might look forward to a narrowing of socioeconomic differences in adult height, and given the link between adult height and mortality risk, this would lead us to expect a narrowing of social inequalities in life expectancy.

Innovation in medicine and biotechnology

Most deaths in old age are caused by cancer, heart disease and stroke. Individualised interventions which aim to delay or halt the progression of these life-threatening diseases account for much of the medical care that is now provided in our society, and an enormous amount of research effort is devoted to developing more effective interventions. Innovations in new fields such as pharmacogenomics and nanotechnology clearly have the potential to provide some of the additional power that is needed to maintain current momentum in what Carey (2003) calls ‘disease prevention and cure’ as a driver of mortality improvements in later life. The magnitude of the gains in life expectancy that may be achieved by such developments should not be over-estimated, however. If we suppose that more effective treatment were to reduce cancer mortality as dramatically over the next two decades as mortality from heart disease has fallen over the last 20 years (ie by about 50%), this would add not much more than a couple of years to life expectancy at birth.

Can we expect to find therapeutic innovation anywhere other than in the development of technologies which offer the prospect of improvements in disease prevention and cure? Carey (2003) himself answers this question by identifying two quite distinct potential drivers of future improvements in mortality: regenerative medicine; and age-retardation. The implication of the distinction is that the development of these technologies would represent an important ’step-change’ in the capabilities of biomedicine to extend healthy lifespans. How likely is it that gains in life expectancy can be maintained on their current trajectory without such a step-change? Olshansky and Carnes (2007), for example, take the view that we should expect a slowdown in mortality improvements unless there is a radical breakthrough in our ability to control the process of biological ageing. They doubt whether Oeppen and Vaupel’s optimistic forecasts for the future of life expectancy in this century can be realised simply by the wider diffusion of healthy living and improved disease prevention and cure.

Since the aim of regenerative medicine is to develop therapies which will restore lost, damaged or ageing cells and tissues in the human body, it seems clear that it has the potential to make a significant contribution to future increases in life expectancy at older ages. As ever in such cases, it is important to distinguish between outputs that might reasonably be expected in the short term, and the more speculative long term promise. The hope that stem cell therapy might be used, for example, to repair damaged heart tissue or to ‘cure’ diabetes lies in the longer term future (DHHS, 2006).

‘Age-retardation’, as it is now generally understood, would represent a step farther even than the ability to repair ageing or damaged tissue and cells in various body systems. Effective age-retarding interventions would stand to regenerative medicine rather as prevention stands to cure. Where regenerative medicine aims to remedy age-related decline in cell and tissue function by repair or replacement, age-retarding interventions would aim to prevent or slow down the processes that underlie that age-related decline in function (President’s Commission on Bioethics, 2003). Once we assume that such interventions are feasible, there is no reason why life expectancy should not eventually exceed the current maximum observed lifespan, and it is this conclusion which has prompted discussion of their social and ethical implications.

Range of potential futures these trends might point to from present to 2025 and 2050.

Greater or smaller gains in life expectancy

What are the main scenarios for longevity apart from the range of trajectories for life expectancy that is bounded by the high and low variant forecasts made by GAD? If we follow Oeppen and Vaupel (2002) in thinking that it is feasible that there should be a more or less linear increase in life expectancy in best-practice countries for most of this century, then it is important to add this optimistic scenario to the range of possible futures for longevity. By the same token, though this does depend on contested assessments of the likely impact of the so-called obesity epidemic on mortality, it seems excessively complacent to discount altogether the risk of a pessimistic scenario in which life expectancy actually starts to fall as younger (and more obese) cohorts start reaching later life, say from 2030 onwards.

A rather different approach to the construction of possible futures for life expectancy in the UK was adopted by the Wanless review on the future of NHS spending (Wanless, 2002). The key variables in this case were (i) the public’s engagement with their own health (ii) the achievement of public health targets, and (iii) health service productivity. Solid progress in these respects would produce life expectancy gains in line with what was then GAD’s high variant forecast. Slow uptake would lead to gains in life expectancy that correspond to GAD’s principal forecast. The fully engaged scenario, however, is associated with mortality improvements beyond what is achieved even in the high variant forecast. The interest of this set of scenarios lies partly, therefore, in the fact that one of the projected outcomes falls outside the boundaries set by GAD’s high and low variants, and partly in the way that movements in mortality trends are connected with opportunities for policy action by government.

Variability in mortality risk

Quite distinct from the question of the magnitude of the gains in life expectancy that might be achieved between now and 2050 is the question of variability in mortality risk. What will happen to (i) the gender gap in life expectancy, and (ii) socioeconomic disparities in life expectancy?

In the GAD variant forecasts male-female life expectancy fails to converge only when life expectancy gains stagnate. In view of this fact, it would seem desirable at least to consider a scenario which combined moderate gains in life expectancy with an increase in the gender gap in life expectancy. In other words, life expectancy would continue to increase for both men and women, but there would no significant increase (or perhaps even a decrease) in the ratio of men to women in the oldest-old population.

The GAD variant forecasts have nothing to say about future trends in socioeconomic disparities in life expectancy. The present government target for reducing inequalities in life expectancy at birth runs to 2010 (a 10% reduction between 2003 and 2010 in the life expectancy gap between local authorities). Whether or not it is likely that our society will achieve proportionately ambitious targets for 2025 and 2050 is open to question. These are nonetheless the benchmark scenarios against which governments should presumably measure their long-term success in reducing socioeconomic disparities in life expectancy. The worst-case scenario is that the relative difference in mortality rates between high and low socioeconomic groups will continue to increase.

More or less disability and ill-health in later life

There are two ways of constructing scenarios for the future of disability and ill-health in the older population. If we want simply to clarify the range of possible outcomes for the interaction between changing life expectancy and changing active life expectancy, we should think in terms of the expansion or compression of disability and ill-health as worst- and best-case scenarios. The most commonly discussed intermediate scenario foresees some increase in the time spent with mild (and relatively manageable) health problems and a stable or decreasing amount of time spent in a severely disabled state.

The approach adopted by most projections for the future of disability and ill-health in the older population is different from this. The scenarios generated by these projections involve an estimate of the numbers of severely disabled or dependent older people in the population based on combinations of alternative trajectories for (i) trends in life expectancy and (ii) trends in age-specific prevalence rates for disability and dependency. This is the kind of approach taken by the PSSRU model for projecting future expenditure on long-term care (eg PSSRU, 2004), and the recent OECD projections on the future of old-age disability (Lafortune, 2007). We can ask, for example, what happens if age-specific prevalence rates:

• remain unchanged and life expectancy grows more quickly than GAD’s principal projection (this is the most common worst-case scenario)
• follow current trends (which generates a positive scenario if rates have been decreasing as they have done in the USA over the last 10 or 20 years)
• decrease in line with optimistic expectations about improving health (eg at an average rate of 1% per year).

A more sophisticated approach to generating the same kind of outcome is used in the scenarios prepared by Jagger et al (2006) for the Wanless review of social care. They outline three basic scenarios:

• a no change scenario which assumes that the age-specific prevalence of disabling chronic disease will remain unchanged. This is not to say that preventive efforts will be ineffective. They will be effective, but only enough to offset the negative impact of obesity on the health and functional status of cohorts that are now still relatively young.. The incidence of dependency will stay the same and mortality rates will decline in line with GAD principal projections.
• a poorer health scenario assumes that current trends in obesity will continue (which means an increase in prevalence of about 2% per annum). This problem will be compounded by the ageing of large ethnic minority populations, which will add to the prevalence of CHD and stroke. Preventive strategies will only partially offset these trends.
• an improving health scenario, which is not that different from the fully engaged scenario for life expectancy. There will be a decline in smoking prevalence and obesity as individuals take their own health more seriously. Health services will be responsive to demand with high rates of technology uptake for disease prevention and excellent rates of diffusion of treatment. Mortality will decline more quickly than in the GAD principal projection.

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Over the last 20 years the chances of a 65 year-old women reaching the age of 80 have improved from 61% to 71%. Although the odds for a 65 year old man are not so good, they are still better than evens (59%), and much better than they were 20 years ago (41%).

This is not true for all developing world. Some countries, such as the USA and Netherlands, have experienced relative stagnation in mortality improvement, especially among women (Mesle and Vallin).

In 1981, the gap in life expectancy at birth was 6 years. In 2006 it was 4.3 years, which is relatively low for a rich country at the beginning of the 21^st century.

The relative gap in death rates between upper and lower socio-economic groups has grown more in northern Europe (inc. the Nordic countries) than in the south.

Although analysis of mortality by ‘underlying cause’ suggests that stroke mortality in the UK has been declining more slowly than CHD mortality in recent years – indicative perhaps of a slowdown in the well-recognised long-term secular decline in stroke mortality – Goldacre et al (2008) have argued that a revision of these estimates may be in order (at least for the UK), since mortality based on underlying cause alone misses about one-quarter of all stroke-related deaths.

Combined life expectancy at birth would reach 100 years before the end of the century.

Though we should not underestimate the difficulties and disagreements involved in determining what the ‘present’ trajectory is.

This is not to say that the data on recent trends might not indicate that there has in fact been a compression of disability over, say, the last 20 years; and this trend may provide the basis for a ‘best-bet’ projection for the future.

When this argument was first developed, dementia was classified as a non-fatal degenerative disease. It now appears as a cause of death on death certificates. Although this change weakens the force of the distinction between fatal and non-fatal degenerative disease, the essential point remains the same.

This compares with the estimate of 6-7 years of life lost at age 40 for obese non-smokers in the Framingham cohort (Peeters et al, 2003)

Olshansky et al (1990) estimated that the elimination of mortality from cancer would add 3.2 years to life expectancy at birth in the USA.

Though presumably it might take quite some time to have this kind of population-wide effect.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

Families

British families have been going through a process of rapid change over the past decades, changing its structure and inner workings. Population ageing has added to the changes in family formation already underway. We will next briefly discuss the impact of demographic change on families, before we consider the most significant changes in family formation. Both have implications for the future of family care giving. A brief excursus on what these changes mean for intergenerational family care relations will complete the discussion of family changes.

Population ageing

The demographic process commonly referred to as ‘population ageing’ or ‘demographic ageing’ is caused by three ‘drivers’: mortality, fertility and migration.

Rising life expectancy

Declining old-age mortality in the second half of the 20^th century is mainly responsible for the substantial increases in life expectancy over the past decades (ONS, 2008a). Just looking at the past two decades reveals an increase in male life expectancy at birth from approximately 72 years (1985-87) to 77 years (2005-07) and in female life expectancy at birth from 77.5 to 81.5 years over the same period (ONS, 2008c). This was a precondition for the development of old age as a general life stage which (nearly) everybody can nowadays expect to reach. The increase in life expectancy implies that ageing family members will spend more joint life time with each other, as partners, as brothers and sisters, as parents with their children, or as grandparents with their grandchildren. Many grandparents will not only accompany their grandchildren into adulthood, but they will also see the birth of great-grandchildren.

Decreased Fertility Rates

Family relations have also been influenced by decreasing fertility rates. Whereas women in the UK had on average three children during the 1960s, fertility dropped below 2.0 in the early 1970s. Birth rates continued to decline over the next three decades to only about 1.6 children per woman by the turn of the millennium. This trend seems to have been reversed lately and fertility has risen again to 1.9 children per woman in 2007 (ONS, 2008b). Nevertheless, fertility is still substantially lower than it was in the ‘baby-boomer’ cohorts that will become senior citizens very soon. If we consider the first baby-boomers to be born in 1947, the first female baby-boomers retired in 2007 – with their male counterparts following from 2012 onwards (ONS, 2008a). Fewer younger people meet more older people within the same family network. As a consequence, fewer children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren will enjoy the attention of more healthy and fit older people within the family, whereas older people will have to cope with fewer children and grandchildren being there to look after them.

Migration

Increasing numbers of families live with the reality of their members being dispersed across a wide geographical area. Research has shown that geographical distance between older parents and their adult children has on average grown over the past decade or so, in response to growing demands for a geographically mobile workforce in the wake of globalisation (Hoff, 2006b). Young families move where jobs are – from rural areas across Britain to the metropolitan hubs of London, Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, or Edinburgh. Although still a rare exception when seen in relation to the total population, growing numbers of highly-qualified workers have moved abroad. More visible is the immigration of foreign-born workers and their families to the UK. As a consequence, trans-national family relations have become a reality of family life in Britain. Long-distance relationships between ageing parents and their adult children, as well as their grandchildren can still be maintained thanks to communication technologies (telephone, email, VoIP, etc.). But such relationships are different from face-to-face contact and cannot be a substitute for physical contact. Moreover, long-distance family relations change the nature of family solidarity. Whereas financial or emotional support do not require a physical presence and can be provided across long distances, instrumental assistance (help with the chores, repairs, shopping, transport) can no longer be given by the family.

Changing family formation

Demographic change is not the only cause of changing family relations. We have witnessed substantial changes in family formation over the past decades that are beginning to have an impact on family life in all life phases.

Postponement of life transitions

A combination of factors has resulted in contemporary Europeans delaying a number of life transitions, which has knock-on effects for other life transitions. Young adults are on average leaving the parental home later than in previous cohorts, forming their first stable adult unions later, are getting married later, and postpone the birth of their first child. All EU member states except Denmark and the Netherlands have witnessed rising shares of young adults aged 20-29 years continuing to live with their parents – a trend that has become notoriously pronounced in the Mediterranean countries. In 1996, more than 80% of Italian, Portuguese and Spanish 20-24 years olds and more than half of those aged 25-29 years old still lived with their parents (Harper, 2006). Likewise, the mean age of women at first marriage has risen from 22.4 years in 1970 to 27.3 years in 2000 in the UK. Unsurprisingly in the face of the above-mentioned developments, age at birth of the first child has risen as well, between 1990 and 2000 alone from 27 to 29 years (Harper, 2006).

Marriage/divorce

Parenthood has become increasingly detached from the institution of marriage. Marriage rates have steadily decreased in England and Wales since the early 1970s, from about 420,000 in 1970 to 275,000 in 2006 (ONS, 2008d). The declining popularity of marriage was accompanied by a trend towards postponement of marriage. The median age of first marriage among British women increased from 21.4 years in 1970 (Kiernan, Land and Lewis, 1998) to 27.5 years in 2000 (ONS, 2004a).

Not only have the absolute numbers of marriages declined over that period. An increasing number of existing marriages were prematurely dissolved through divorce. The absolute number of divorces in England and Wales doubled from about 800,000 in 1970 to 1.6 million in 1990 – it has slightly decreased since then (about 1.4 million in 2000) (ONS, 2002). British divorce rates in the late 1980s were six times higher than in 1960 (Lewis, 1993).

Plurality of family forms

Much has been written about so-called ‘new’ family forms, including lone parents, cohabiting couples with children, families ‘living-apart-together’, and so-called ‘patchwork families’ or ‘reconstituted families’. ‘Patchwork’ or ‘reconstituted’ families provide an excellent example of the growing complexity of family life – they refer to the combination of more than two family networks following separation/divorce. Individuals may end up having children with partners from different relationships, with each adult union adding a new set of relationships with members of another family network while (at least to some extent) trying to maintain contact with those from previous relationships. Later in life, grandparent-grandchild relationships add to the complexity (Dimmock et al, 2004).

British official statistics provide evidence that – despite continuously low birth rates – the number of families has indeed increased over the last decade. This growth, however, is entirely due to rising numbers of lone parents and cohabiting couples with children. In contrast, the number of married couple families has declined during this period (ONS, 2004b).

Since the early 1980s the emergence of widespread cohabitation has been the main driving force behind the dramatic increase in extramarital births in Britain (Kiernan et al, 1998). Haskey (2001) estimated based on 1998 GHS data that as many as 29% of all women in Great Britain were living in cohabitation, a threefold increase since the mid 1970s (Haskey, 2001). Cohabitation after dissolution of previous marriage is not exactly a new phenomenon – but it has now become far more widespread. Nowadays, there is no pressure to find a new marriage partner soon after divorce since cohabitation offers a feasible alternative. What is new though is the prevalence of cohabitation amongst never-married young people in their twenties and early thirties, who either accept cohabitation as an alternative to marriage, or see it as test period with fewer commitments that precedes future marriage (Kiernan et al, 1998).

Furthermore, the numbers and the share of one-parent families have also risen. In 2001, they accounted for a quarter of all families with dependent children in England and Wales (ONS, 2004b). In Britain, nine out of ten one-parent families are headed by a lone mother (Haskey, 2002; ONS, 2004b). However, only a few lone parents have lived in this family form for more than ten years. Lone parenthood has become a life-cycle stage (Ford and Millar, 1998) through which many more individuals pass than there are lone parents at any point in time. According to estimates based on British Household Panel Study data, as many as 40% of all British mothers will have had sole responsibility for raising their children at some point in their lives (Ermisch and Francesconi, 2000).

These trends towards plurality of family forms have influenced the relations between ageing marriage partners, old parents and their adult children, and between grandparents and grandchildren. Although couples may have the chance to grow old together, there is a higher percentage of divorce at an advanced age than before. Consequently, relationships with children have changed as well. Older parents may have relationships with biological as well as with stepchildren. This may result in a larger variety of parent-child relationships, but could also imply decreased reliability of support at times of need. Grandparents may become more important to grandchildren when parents separate. Grandparents’ rights to maintain the relationship with their grandchildren after divorce has become a hot legal issue, arguably to be considered in divorce settlements (Ferguson, 2004). The rising proportion of single parent families has lead to more responsibilities for grandparents in respect to financial transfers and (grand-)child care provision.

Childlessness

Another challenge to family life is the growing prevalence of childlessness. As many as a fifth of Americans aged 65 years and over is without spouse and child (Dykstra and Hagestad, 2007a). Nevertheless, as German data shows, the proportion of childless individuals in today’s middle-aged cohorts is still significantly higher than in old-age cohorts, even when controlling for a reproductive phase not yet completed (Engstler and Menning, 2005).

Although childlessness has become less stigmatised than in the past, people without children still have to justify themselves for not having children. “Stereotypes suggest that those who remain childless in marriage are avoiding social responsibility and are being self-indulgent.” (Dykstra and Hagestad, 2007a, p1284). Survey data shows that childlessness has become more acceptable in younger birth cohorts: while 73% of British men and 63% of British women born before 1930 would agree with the statement “A marriage without children is not fully complete”, only 35% of British men born 1950-1970 and 29% of British women in the same cohort would agree with this statement (Dykstra and Hagestad, 2007a).

It is, however, important to keep in mind that pathways leading into childlessness vary. People can be without children for very different reasons – involuntary or as a matter of choice. Research evidence from the U.S. indicates that the timing of life transitions is crucial for having children. Postponed lifetime transitions has knock-on effects and effectively blocks second chances for having children (Hagestad and Call, 2007). Somewhat counter intuitively, childlessness makes more of a difference in men’s than in women’s lives, ie the differences between childless men and fathers are more pronounced than those between childless women and mothers (Dykstra and Hagestad, 2007b).

Effects on intergenerational family relations

The changes in the age structure of the population and in family formation described above have resulted in subtle changes in intergenerational relationships within the family. The combination of an extended lifespan and the existence of fewer family members due to lower fertility have resulted in a narrowing of the more recently born generations and a verticalisation of family structures, which have been dubbed ‘beanpole families’ (Bengtson, Rosenthal and Burton, 1990). “Individuals will thus grow older having more vertical than horizontal linkages in the family.” (Harper, 2006, p181). Children and parents can now expect to live in very long-term relationships, spanning half a century or even more. Recent research found a number of positive effects of increasing longevity on intergenerational solidarity (Bengtson, 2001; Silverstein, 2006). On the other hand, the above-described trend towards increasing geographical distances between ageing parents and their adult children diminishes the potential for instrumental support (Shelton and Grundy, 2000; Hoff, 2006b).

Grandparenthood has been influenced in a complex manner by these changes. On the one hand, longer life has heightened the likelihood of grandchildren having four living grandparents at birth, as well as at the transition to adulthood. The percentage of Americans having at least one grandparent when the grandchild reaches the age of 40 has increased from 1% in the year 1900 to 21% in the year 2000 (Uhlenberg and Kirby, 1998). The other side of the coin is of course that grandparents see their grandchildren growing up, in many cases having children of their own. On the other hand, declining fertility has resulted in fewer grandchildren: in the U.S., the number of grandchildren per woman has declined from about 12 in the year 1900 to about 6 in the year 1980, with a further declining trend (Uhlenberg and Kirby, 1998). The combined effects of rising life expectancy (more years spent with grandchildren) and falling fertility (fewer grandchildren) may even have unexpected side effects, such as fit and wealthy grandparents competing for the attention of fewer grandchildren (Uhlenberg, 2005).

This section has shown that family structures have been undergoing profound changes over the past decades, which has implications for the realisation of family care in today’s society. We will now turn our attention towards care and care giving, ie a specific aspect of family life that is of particular importance in an ageing society.

Care

What is care?

The words ‘care’ and ‘caring’ are frequently used in English. Care is part of everyday life, and as such taken for granted. Nevertheless, coming up with a clear definition what care actually means is far from easy. The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (2005) refers to care as “the process of caring for somebody/something and providing what they need for their health or protection”. Similar definitions can be found in the social science literature informing this report. Daly and Lewis (1998), for example, define care as “… activities involved in meeting the physical and emotional needs of dependent adults and children …” (Daly and Lewis, 1998, cited in Daly, 2000, p38). It is important to keep in mind that care giving is not limited to certain life phases (childhood, old age) – it is given and taken by almost everyone at some stage throughout the life course.

The caring relationship between mother and child has become the prototypical image of the concept. Care is a characteristic of relationships, implying intimacy in interpersonal relations, most commonly associated with familial relationships (Fine, 2007; Phillips, 2007). At the same time, care involves tireless hard work. There is probably no better term for adequately describing its nature than the title Janet Finch and Dulcie Groves selected for their book on the issue in 1983: A Labour of Love (Finch and Groves, 1983).

The meaning of the concept of care in relationships has remained open to considerable dispute. Part of the problem is that care is a very complex, multi-dimensional concept. Likewise, it is very difficult to define clear boundaries of the concept. Caring can be perceived as an act of helping, supporting, assisting, or it can be presented as a more holistic concept inherent to any relationship, regardless of whether that is within the family, with friends, neighbours, work colleagues, superiors, peers, or subordinates.

The caring relationship implies that a minimum of two people are involved in the act of caring: the caregiver and the care recipient. The ideal-typical mother-child-relationship camouflages the bipolar power structure of the relationship: the caregiver as the active, powerful agent caring for the passive, powerless care recipient. Likewise, agency plays an important role in the conceptualisation of care. The passive care recipient is not an agent of her/his fate – s/he is dependent on the caregiver who, in contrast, is independent and in control of her/his actions (Phillips, 2007).

Accordingly, the academic debate on care and caring has been subject to considerable change, focusing on very different aspects. In the past, it was mainly conceived negatively, as a ‘burden’ (Phillips, 2007). Later on, it was predominantly conceived as unpaid activity in the domestic sphere (Daly, 2000), which was synonymously associated with the traditional model of care assuming that women (as mothers, wives, and daughters) would provide care in the home, according to their traditional role as the home-maker, as opposed to the man as the breadwinner (Lewis, 1992). In the UK, a considerable body of research on care and care-giving has developed. Initially, research focused on carers, their work and their circumstances. Later on, the academic and policy debate broadened to incorporate related issues, including the nature of care work, the rights of disabled people, the role of the wider community in providing care (community care), and the gendered nature of caring (Phillips, 2007).

Furthermore, care has become the central concept in the re-conceptualisation of the welfare state (Ungerson, 1990; Leira, 1992; Lewis, 1992; Sainsbury, 1994; Daly, 2000). European welfare states have long been conceptualised according to their social security arrangements as being ‘residual’ or ‘institutional’ (Titmuss, 1958; Titmuss, 1974) or the degree of (in)dependence on earned income to secure one’s livelihood (Esping-Andersen, 1990). Since the early 1990s – and very much in response to Esping-Andersen’s (1990) book – an alternative approach of conceptualising welfare states using ‘gender’ as core concept has emerged, which resulted in new classifications of ‘gendered welfare states’ (Sainsbury, 1994) or ‘gender regimes’ (Pascall and Lewis, 2004). However, the concept really underlying this new approach is ‘care’, very much reflected in the development of an entirely new stream of welfare state typologies based on the notion of care, so-called ‘care regimes’ (Anttonen and Sipila, 1996; Bettio and Plantenga, 2004).

Classifications of care regimes are based on the recognition that there are cross-cultural differences in care provision. These cultural differences are not limited to international comparison. What constitutes good quality care, for example, will always be culturally defined. People from rural areas may have expectations about ‘good quality care’ which are quite different from those common in a big city; people from a traditional working class background vs a middle-class background may think quite differently about what it means to give/receive good quality care; people belonging to different generations are very likely to disagree about what constitutes good quality care; people from various ethnic backgrounds will have different opinions about good quality care, which again are different from those held by the indigenous population.

Informal vs formal care

However, usage of the concept of care has not been restricted to family care. Formal care providers were established in both the public and in the private market sectors. Care work in the formal sector is generally perceived differently from that in informal relationships. Health and social care are primarily about maintenance, about the re-establishment of a previous level of health and/or independence (Phillips, 2007). Until the 1980s, formal care work was equal with care provided by the public sector. This has changed in the wake of the ‘neo-liberal revolution’ spearheaded by Margaret Thatcher. Care has now become a commodity that can be traded in the market. In essence, care in its formal meaning has become an industry, a business. With the prospect of population ageing and projections of rising numbers of older people needing care the ‘care industry’ is widely seen as a ‘growth market’, promising substantial profits. That is probably as far away from the informal ‘labour of love’ as it gets, and illustrates the enormous scope the same concept of care covers, from an intimate relationship quality to a commodity traded in the market for the purpose of making money.

According to ‘Carers UK’, the term ‘carer’ is used to distinguish those who provide care for others on an unpaid basis from those who are paid (care workers, home helps and people employed by someone with a disability) (Carers UK, 2008a). The author of this report would argue that the definition used by Carers UK actually refers to informal carers. He stated elsewhere (Hoff, 2006a) that informal support/care is based on personal relationships, thus including forms of assistance that family, friends, acquaintances, neighbours, colleagues, etc. give each other. Informal care/support is not paid for. It is also not regulated or monitored (Phillips, 2007). Thus, informal care would also include care given on an interpersonal basis within self-help groups.

In contrast, formal support/care is provided on the basis of private law contracts or social welfare legislation (Hoff, 2006a). In other words, formal care/support is regulated, adherence to these regulations is monitored and care provision is paid for (Phillips, 2007). All support/care provided by professional supporters/carers belong to this category. This includes care provision by the public sector, as well as that provided by commercial carers.

This dichotomous conceptualisation is, of course, a simplification. In reality, the boundaries between formal and informal care are often blurred. Nevertheless, fundamental similarities inherent to the nature of care prevail in both informal and formal care. First of all, caring is very often an intimate activity – formal care also has to address needs that are of an essentially intimate nature (eg bathing, body care, dressing) (Twigg, 2001). Secondly, at the heart of care provision is ‘emotional labour’ (Hochschild, 1983), which is thirdly predominantly provided by women who, in most cases, are primary carers. Fourthly, in spite of its intimate nature caring is still widely regarded as a lowly qualified, and hence, low-paid and low-status activity. And finally, the close association of caring with vulnerability and dependency on the one hand and with love and emotion on the other, coupled with the low-skilled low-paid reality of caring, have resulted in the reoccurrence of hotly debated issues of quality of care (Phillips, 2007).

The informal vs formal conceptualisation can serve as a vital tool to reduce complexity. However, the future lies in complementary rather than contradictory roles for both spheres, with paid care professionals assisting unpaid family carers and vice versa. This has actually been a major demand of academic and advocacy critics of existing care arrangements in the UK and in Europe arguing that an arbitrary separation of professional and of lay care, of health care and of social care, would harm the true purpose of care giving – improving the quality of life of the person in need of care.

Childcare vs eldercare

As pointed out at the beginning of this section, the concept of care originates in the family domain. Families have always been the main source of help to anyone in need (Lewis, 1997; Twigg, 1998). It has been argued that the family’s care giving role has come under severe strain in the wake of demographic change, changing norms about gender roles and employment, globally mobile workforces, changing attitudes regarding individual freedom vs responsibility, as well as citizenship rights. As previously mentioned, family care entails care giving throughout the life course and has various dimensions, for example childcare, disabled care or eldercare, spousal care, or intergenerational care. Childcare and eldercare will be central topics of this report – hence we will have a slightly closer look at differences and similarities between the two.

Perhaps the most significant difference between childcare and eldercare is to what extent it can be anticipated and, hence, prepared for. Generally speaking, childcare needs are predicable and can be organised. It is usually the breakdown of these childcare arrangements (due to illness of the child or child carer, for example) that causes a problem. In contrast, care for older adults is much more unpredictable (Yeandle et al, 2002). It can occur very suddenly, literally overnight (following a stroke, a heart attack, a serious fall, etc), or it can be a slow, protracted process of continuous decline. In either case, it is difficult to bear, and unlike childcare it does not involve an equal measure of positive sentiments.

Another important difference between the two is directional: although parents of young children may feel from time to time that their child is not developing at the same pace as it should do, the direction is nevertheless clear – the child will learn ever more and master new things s/he was previously unable to do, becoming more and more independent from her/his parents. It is a completely different story with care for older adults. The direction is towards declining abilities and capacity, towards more dependency.

These subtle differences may have implications for respective care arrangements, including the reconciliation of employment with childcare vs that with care for older adults. Yeandle et al (2002) found in their study of retail, banking and public sector workers in Sheffield and Canterbury that informal support networks dominated in both childcare and eldercare giving.

Particularly precarious are the circumstances of workers caring for both children and older family members – in research on intergenerational relationships referred to as ’sandwich generation’ (Borchers, 1997; Nichols and Junk, 1997; Roots, 1998; Williams, 2004) or ‘pivot generation’ (Attias-Donfut and Wolff, 2000; Mooney and Statham, 2002). Although research has shown that double caring responsibilities for children and older adults is a rare condition experienced only by a small proportion of the population (Loomis and Booth, 1995; Grundy and Henretta, 2006; Kuenemund, 2006), few would contest that any person ‘trapped’ between caring for children and older family members, as well as having to earn the family’s livelihood, will find it extremely difficult to cope.

Having looked at family change and care already, we will next focus on the third element – work – in preparation for a well-informed discussion of the reconciliation of employment and informal care responsibilities. This section will be slightly shorter than the previous ones since a substantial part of work-related issues will be covered by the subsequent extended part on the reconciliation of employment and family care.

Work

Ageing workforces

The European context

Growing global competition by other regions in the world (United States, Japan, China, India, etc.) has challenged the sustainability of the European model of society and the financial foundations of its comprehensive welfare states. The member states of the European Union agreed at the European Council meeting in Lisbon in March 2000 on the so-called Lisbon Strategy with the aim to make the EU ‘the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion, and respect for the environment by 2010′. In recognition of the irreversibility of demographic change for the coming decades, the Lisbon Strategy also spelled out the need to promote the employment of older workers. The need to make best use of the human resources available – which, in the context of ageing societies, translates into utilising the specific skills and knowledge of a growing share of older workers – has to become an asset in an increasingly competitive global market, if the above-mentioned vision is not to fail. On the other hand, continuously rising life expectancies have put the financial sustainability of public pension systems under pressure. As a consequence, many EU member states have extended the working life by postponing the legal retirement age, thus further increasing the share of older workers in the workforce.

In spite of these trends, older workers are at present underrepresented in European workforces (see, for example, Aliaga and Romans, 2006), due to the persistence of negative stereotypes about the allegedly low productivity of older workers (Boersch-Supan, Duzgun and Weiss, 2005; Ruzik and Perek-Bialas, 2005). The EU member states decided at the EU Lisbon summit in 2000 to actively promote the employment of older workers with the aim that each member state would reach an employment rate of older workers aged 55-64 years of 50% or more by 2010. Most EU member states made significant progress between 2000-2005, but only a minority of countries (in descending order, beginning with the highest employment rate of older workers in 2005: Sweden, Denmark, Estonia, the UK, Finland, Ireland, Portugal, Cyprus and Lithuania) met the 50% target (Aliaga and Romans, 2006).

Ageing workforces in the UK

Having looked at the broader European context, we will now return to the situation faced by older workers in the UK. Like many other European countries, Britain witnessed a dramatic fall in employment rates for older men in particular since the mid 1970s, coinciding with the decline of traditional industries. In line with policy development elsewhere in Europe, early retirement schemes encouraged older workers to leave the labour market well before reaching legal retirement age, especially at times of high unemployment during economic downturns.

About a decade ago, these policies were reconsidered and abolished (see, for example, DWP, 2005; Robinson, Gosling and Lewis, 2005), eventually reversing the trend. Growing awareness of demographic ageing certainly played a role. However, it may be argued that economic recovery played an equally important role (Phillipson and Smith, 2005). Fiscal concerns about the sustainability of public pension systems motivated a change in pension regime from ‘defined benefit’ to ‘defined contribution’, thus giving a financial incentive for extending working life, especially in the context of falling equity markets (Phillipson and Smith, 2005).

Indeed, employment rates of older workers have increased again since the late 1990s, resulting in a growing share of older people in the UK workforce (1992: 21% – 2004: 25%) (Dixon 2003). Nevertheless, large numbers still retire well ahead of the statutory retirement age: on average, men are leaving the workforce aged 63 years, women aged 61 years, with a quarter of them even retiring before 58 (men) or 57 (women) years of age respectively (Phillipson and Smith, 2005). In other words, a persistent pattern of early exits from the labour market remains a serious challenge to any plans for extending working life.

Life-long learning and the productivity of older workers

It was noted above that older workers across Europe continue to experience negative stereotypes about their productivity, an experience still shared by many older workers in the UK. It seems common sense that older people work more slowly. What this view overlooks is that productivity no longer entirely depends on physical speed. In most cases, older workers can counterbalance the loss of speed, strength and certain memory functions through experience, interpersonal skills and higher work motivation (Meadows, 2003; Warnes and John, 2005). A common misunderstanding regards younger people as better learners, arguing therefore that investment in their skills and qualifications would bring better returns. The fact that older workers from the traditional manufacturing industries who never learned how to acquire knowledge found it particularly difficult to adjust to new working environments may have contributed to this misperception. Although the cohorts educated/trained in the immediate post-war period have the greatest training needs, they are least likely to receive any training (Humphrey et al, 2003; Urwin, 2004; Phillipson and Smith, 2005). Employees on fixed-term contracts or in part-time employment have been particularly disadvantaged in this regard (Lissenburgh and Smeaton, 2003).

But lack of training received by older workers is not only due to negative stereotypes about their learning capacity. There is also evidence that older workers themselves fail to engage in training opportunities when provided (Urwin, 2004; Phillipson and Smith, 2005). Existing research speculates to what extent lack of confidence in their abilities (Newton et al, 2003) or lack of perspective near the end of their working lives (McNair et al, 2004) may be to blame. On the other hand, Taylor and Urwin’s (2001) research suggests that declining participation in training was more often due to employers’ decisions than to their employees’ (Taylor and Urwin, 2001). McNair et al (2004) suggest that enterprise size is a key factor in determining whether or not older workers are offered participation in training: whereas large companies continued to train their workforce regardless of age, this was not the case in small and medium-sized enterprises.

Although the British government has acknowledged the vital importance of life-long learning until old age, not much has changed until today (DfES, 2005). The extension of working life presupposes access to training and further skills development (Phillipson and Smith, 2005). Unless the training needs of older workers are addressed, their situation in the labour market will worsen (OECD, 2004). There is however some hope that future cohorts of older workers will fare better since they will have undergone better education and training when they began their career (Dixon, 2003).

A more detailed account of the potential of life-long learning can be found in the review paper by Leeson in this volume. We will continue our discussion of work-related matters in the following central part of this review, which focuses in detail on the complex issue of reconciling employment and family care.

Reconciliation of family care and employment

By the turn of the millennium, nearly 7 million informal carers provided support across the UK (Maher and Green, 2002). Nearly three quarters of them were looking after an older person, usually parents or parents-in-law. About half of them were aged 45-64 years, most of them trying to combine care and employment. The likelihood of caring for an older, disabled or long-term ill person increases with age to peak in middle age (45-64 years) (Evandrou and Glaser, 2003). 13% of full-time employees and 17% of part-time employees provided informal care (Maher and Green, 2002). These figures only represent a snapshot picture. Adopting a longitudinal perspective, we expect to find a much higher percentage of people providing informal care while being employed at some stage of their lives (Arksey, 2002; Evandrou and Glaser, 2003; Pickard, 2004). The reconciliation of employment and care for older adults is likely to become even more of an issue following the extension of working life in response to a growing shortage of young and middle-aged skilled workers and growing financial pressures on the public pension systems.

Family care friendly legislation

Most so-called ‘family-friendly’ schemes were initially designed for working parents of young children. There is still a lack of equivalent schemes for those combining work with care for older adults (Bernard and Phillips, 2007). Below, we will first look at the substantial family policy reforms implemented by consecutive New Labour governments from the late 1990s onwards. As will be shown, these policies were heavily biased towards families with young children. Following that, we will discuss reforms of the care system which slowly but surely began addressing the needs of older adults.

Family policy reform

New Labour’s social policy reforms since 1997 have been heavily influenced by the notion of social exclusion/inclusion on the one hand, and a ‘welfare-to-work’ rationale on the other. This has to be seen against a backdrop of rising employment rates and steadily growing average real incomes throughout the 1990s in British society, leaving behind low-income families with children excluded from the labour market (Blundell, 2001). In order to reverse that trend, the New Labour government redesigned existing policy measures to bring these disadvantaged social groups back into paid work and make their employment sustainable in the long run. For the first time ever, the British government developed and implemented a coherent family policy at central government level, consisting of four central elements:

(1) New Deals: The so-called New Deal programmes targeted specific sub-groups that were particularly likely to be affected by deprivation and social exclusion (lone parents, young unemployed, long-term unemployed and their partners, disabled people, older workers). The first such programme was the New Deal for Lone Parents (NDLP) in 1997 (for a thorough evaluation of New Labour’s early New Deal programmes, see Millar, 2000). The latest New Deal programme is the New Deal for Carers that was announced in 2006 (DoH, 2006). All New Deal programmes come with a variety of different support measures. A common feature, however, is the focus on treating people as individuals, taking into account their individual circumstances and needs, as well as providing information and guidance through Personal Advisors (Millar, 2000).

(2) Tax Credits: Over the years, the government systematically introduced various tax credits, administered by the Inland Revenue rather than the Department of Social Security, thus removing the stigma associated with the take-up of means-tested benefits. These tax credits replaced the means-tested benefit Family Credit, which was abolished in 1999. It was replaced with the Working Families’ Tax Credit (WFTC). In 2003, the WFTC made way for the Working Tax Credit (WTC). Families receive an additional Child Tax Credit (CTC) on top of the WTC. Another tax credit, the Child Care Tax Credit (CCTC) was introduced in the same year as part of the WTC package to enable poor parents in particular to get employed.

(3) National Childcare Strategy: Another major element of the new British family policy was the introduction of the National Strategy for Childcare in 1998 (DfEE, 1998) aimed at creating 900,000 new places for 1.6 million children in England by 2004. Its intention was to forge partnerships between local authorities on one hand and childcare providers in the private and voluntary sector on the other in order to provide childcare for every four year old, at least on a part-time basis. It was successful in substantially increasing day nursery and after-school club places, but was partly offset by declining numbers of registered childminders (Yeandle et al, 2002). A few years later, the Sure Start Early Education programme was implemented to provide the same for three year olds.

(4) Parental leave schemes: The fourth core element was the introduction of parental leave legislation that passed through Parliament in 2003, accompanied by a reform and increase of Statutory Maternity Pay. For the first time in UK history, parents were entitled to family care leave schemes comparable to those in place elsewhere on the European continent. With the introduction of Paternal Leave, fathers were explicitly encouraged to take parental leave.

Care policy reform

Facing the prospect of an ageing society, successive British governments passed several pieces of legislation to address care issues. The NHS and Community Care Act in 1990 marked the beginning of reform of British care policies, followed by the Carers (Recognition and Services) Act in 1995, and the National Strategy for Carers in 1999 (DSS, 1999). But only the implementation of the Carers and Disabled Children Act in 2000 gave family carers the right to assess for themselves what would constitute the best reconciliation strategy for their specific individual circumstances (Bernard and Phillips, 2007). In the same year, the Care Standards Act was enacted, establishing a National Care Standards Commission to monitor and regulate domiciliary care services. In this process, local authorities have received substantial grants to provide for the needs of carers (Carers Grants) – the government estimates it to amount to as much as £1.7 billion by March 2011 (HM Government, 2008). Another major piece of legislation addressing the needs of family carers was the Carers (Equal Opportunities) Act 2004, which made it obligatory for councils to inform carers of their rights. Moreover, it strengthened employed carers’ rights by requiring councils to take into account whether or not somebody wants to continue paid work, education or training while looking after a family member when assessing a carer’s needs. In 2006, the Community Services White Paper “Our health, our care, our say” (DoH, 2006) announced a New Deal for Carers, following the rationale of previous New Deal programmes.

The government’s vision for the future of family care was outlined in the recently published National Strategy for Carers 2008 (HM Government, 2008), which was signed by seven government departments, thus emphasising its overarching importance and the willingness to concentrate resources and effort on achieving the aims of this ambitious programme. It highlights the enormous contribution family carers make to the well-being of the younger and the older generations and emphasises the need to provide services tailor-made for individual needs. By 2018, carers ought to be respected as ‘expert care partners’ and will have access to personalised support services, enabling to live a life of their own alongside their caring duties. Resources will be focused on providing respite care. More and better education and training opportunities will be offered for both formal and informal carers. The government is aiming at abolishing the much criticised lack of communication / cooperation between the NHS and family carers as well as community care providers (GPs, voluntary sector organisations) and replacing it with a partnership on equal footing. Critics argue that the National Strategy for Carers can only be the beginning and voiced disappointment about the failure of the government to change carers’ benefits, such as Carer’s Allowance (Carers UK, 2008c).

Legislation aimed at a better reconciliation of employment and family care

In 1999, the Employment Relations Act gave workers the right to ‘reasonable’ unpaid leave to deal with unexpected care issues. It also entitled parents of children born after 15 December 1999 to 13 weeks of unpaid leave during the first five years of each child’s life, which was extended to 18 weeks in 2001. The 2001 Budget included a number of other innovations: the extension of Maternity Leave from 18 to 26 weeks from April 2003, as well as the introduction of a paid Adoption Leave scheme and two weeks paid Paternity Leave. The implementation of the EU Working Time Directive in 1998 restricted weekly working hours to a maximum of 48 hours and introduced a right to four weeks of paid leave per year. This was followed by the implementation of the EU Part-time Working Directive in 2000, which gave part-time workers the same rights as full-time workers. The Employment Act 2002 introduced the right to request flexible working for parents of children under the age of six. An independent review recommended that this right should be extended to parents of children under the age of 17 (Walsh, 2008). The Work and Families Act 2006 extended this right to carers of (older) adults.

Enterprise based reconciliation strategies

Employers are increasingly under pressure to implement family-friendly policies (Bernard and Phillips, 2007). The majority of public sector workers in Bernard and Phillips (2007) study reported that their employers tried to accommodate their family responsibilities. In the private sector, industries in which employees could be easily replaced by others (eg in the retail sector) found it easier to implement flexible work policies than those in which that was not possible (eg banking) (Yeandle et al, 2002). All organisations in Yeandle et al’s (2002) study of the city councils, the banking and the retail industries in Sheffield and Canterbury had implemented formal policies to enable their employees to combine work and family care duties. These included a variety of measures. All organisations studied offered working part-time, job sharing and various leave schemes. Some of the latter were specifically targeted at parents of younger children, such as Paternity Leave (usually paid) or Parental/Adoption Leave (usually unpaid). Other leave schemes are intended to give flexibility to anyone faced with a family related crisis, including Carers’ Leave or Emergency Leave (usually unpaid), as well as Compassionate Leave (there are paid and unpaid variants). Other strategies were ‘flexi-time’, ‘V-time’ (voluntary reduced work time options), shift-swap schemes, tele-working/working from home, ‘flexi-place working’, and taking a career-break. We will have a brief look at the most common reconciliation strategies used by British employers next.

Reduction of working hours / part-time work

A ’strategy’ used by many women – and approved by many employers – to cope with the contradictory demands of employment and caring is to reduce working hours (Evandrou and Glaser, 2003), though ’strategy’ may not be the right term since it is often born out of the inability to work full-time. Apparently, the need to reduce working hours is less necessary in the public sector (Bernard and Phillips, 2007).

Carers’ Leave

The majority of working family carers admitted not being familiar with the new UK Carers’ Leave legislation (Bernard and Phillips, 2007). Yeandle et al (2002) found that both city councils and the supermarket studied only permitted unpaid Carers’ Leave, whereas the bank studied offered payment for the limited period of five working days.

Leave from work

The notion of taking leave from work sounds promising in the first instance. However, only too often employees have to take their annual leave to sort out care issues (from taking a day off for taking an older relative to the hospital to an extended period of caring) (Bernard and Phillips, 2007). On the other hand, Yeandle et al (2002) found that the bank in their study offered six months unpaid leave for employees with care responsibilities for older adults or family members with disabilities. The retail company participating in the same study had introduced three months unpaid leave for older workers during the winter months. Taking ‘time off in lieu’ is more common in the public sector where it is equally important for those eligible (Bernard and Phillips 2007). However, a problem inherent to taking ‘time off in lieu’ is that it can only be taken if work processes allow it. There is no right to take this time off, as it is with annual leave, and even if granted the permission can be withdrawn if there is a crisis at work.

Other work-related help

The formal carers in Bernard and Phillip’s (2007) study took advantage of the in-house counselling services. Using the work telephone to keep in contact with the care recipient at home was seen as an important means of support by others (Bernard and Phillips, 2007).

Summarising the various leave schemes in operation in British companies we come to the conclusion that there are quite a few options available for workers with family care responsibilities. However, lack of awareness by both line-managers and employees has remained a major problem in all organisations (Yeandle et al, 2002).

The role of line managers/supervisors

According to previous research on the issue, success or failure in reconciling work and care duties largely depends on the employee’s line-manager/supervisor (Yeandle et al, 2003). Depending on their attitudes towards care work – or even more fundamentally, to the role of women in the workplace – reconciliation of employment and care could become easier or much harder. A major part of the problem is that efficiency, productivity and commitment are still commonly equated with working long hours (Lewis, 2001). Unsupportive managers and colleagues shaping an uncaring workplace culture were identified as a major source of problems (Bernard and Phillips, 2007). On the other hand, sympathetic work colleagues, especially those who have had similar experiences, can become a valuable source of support.

Somewhat counter-intuitively, there does not seem to be a difference between female and male managers in this regard (Bernard and Phillips, 2007). What seems to be crucial, however, is past experience in dealing with care giving issues (Yeandle et al, 2003). However, previous research also revealed that many line-managers had not received appropriate training making them aware of such policies; often there was even lack of communication and consultation on company policies in this regard (Yeandle et al, 2002; Yeandle et al, 2003). As research evidence from the United States shows, employees are much more likely to make use of ‘work-life benefits’ if they work in a family-friendly work environment (Thompson, Beauvais and Lyness, 1999; Allen, 2001).

Working carers particularly stressed the importance of their managers as being approachable, flexible and sympathetic (Bernard and Phillips, 2007). Likewise, line-managers expressed their intention to be as flexible as possible, but sometimes they found it hard to balance their employees’ and the company’s interests, especially at times of crisis (Yeandle et al, 2002; Yeandle et al, 2003). However, they also insisted that each case had to be treated on an individual basis, taking into account the specific needs as well as the specific work relationship with that employee. Both sides stated that reciprocity, ie ‘give and take’, was a crucial element of that relationship. Generally, managers tended to be more accommodating with employees who made an effort for the organisation, such as by working longer hours at times of need. Mutual trust – or what Bernard and Phillips (2007) refer to as ‘bank of trust’ – appears to be a crucial element of well-functioning work relationships, even under severe strain imposed by family care responsibilities. It works both ways – employees clearly don’t feel comfortable approaching their managers unless they had established a working relationship with them over some period of time.

External factors influencing family-friendly work arrangements

There are a number of external factors influencing the success/failure of reconciling employment and care for an older family member. The most important ones will be discussed in this section.

Different industries

Conflict patterns and reconciliation strategies are likely to vary across different industries. A study conducted by Phillips, Bernard and Chittenden (2002) explored two public sector organisations, a National Health Service Trust and a Social Services Department (Phillips, Bernard and Chittenden, 2002; Bernard and Phillips, 2007). Another study carried out by Yeandle, Wigfield, Crompton and Dennett (2002) focused on private enterprises, namely the retail and the banking sector, investigating the situation in a major supermarket and a renowned bank (Yeandle et al, 2002). They then compared their findings with a public sector organisation, Sheffield City Council, yet again representing a working environment different from the ones mentioned above. Another study focussing specifically on the role of line managers in implementing family-friendly arrangements, also directed by Sue Yeandle, compared various organisations within the private sector, including nine ’small and medium sized enterprises’ (SME) from very different industries (such as technical services, paper manufacturing, electrical industry, diagnostics, surveillance, etc.), several banks and assurance companies, and a retail company, with again different ones in the public sector, including a NHS trust, a Social Services Department, two local authorities (Yeandle et al, 2003). Their research evidence indicates that family-friendly work arrangements are more common in public than in private sector organisations, more common in larger than in smaller enterprises, and more common in companies with a strong trade union representation (Bond et al, 2002; Phillips et al, 2002; Yeandle et al, 2002; Yeandle et al, 2003; Bernard and Phillips, 2007). They also found that companies, particularly in the service and banking industries, want to be seen as a ‘caring company’ and a ‘caring employer’ (Yeandle et al, 2002). More importantly, however, was the desire to retain highly qualified staff, thus avoiding the high costs for recruiting and training new staff, as well as improving/maintaining their motivation to work hard for their companies.

Age structure

A crucial factor in determining conflict patterns and appropriate support measures is the age structure of the workforce. A younger workforce is more likely to require childcare, whereas an older workforce is more likely to need assistance with eldercare. There tend to be subtle differences in the age structures of certain industries: while young workers are over-represented in the retail sector, people in their late 20s, 30s and early 40s dominate the banking sector. In contrast, the public sector is dominated by middle-aged employees in their 40s and early 50s (Yeandle et al, 2002).

Gender differences

Although today men are more likely to care for older family members than in the past, women (wives and daughters) still constitute the vast majority of carers of older family members. Furthermore, more than 90% of formal carers in the NHS Trust and social services department studied by Bernard and Phillips (2007) were female. Moreover, there are subtle differences between male and female caring arrangements. For example, male family carers are more likely to be in full-time employment than female ones who are more likely to be working part-time (Bernard and Phillips, 2007). Accordingly, women spend more hours on family care on average than men, and women are more likely to have multiple caring responsibilities.

Hours of work vs. hours of care

Bernard and Phillips (2007) found that the majority of family carers in their public sector sample had care commitments of less than 10 hours per week. However, more than a tenth had to cope with combining more than 20 hours of care work per week with employment. Overall, 70% were primary care givers, with two thirds of them having sole, and the other third having joint, care responsibility.

Travel distance/time between work and home

The time needed to travel between home and work, or rather between the home of the care recipient and work, can become an additional stressor making a successful reconciliation difficult. Bernard and Phillips (2007) identified a tenth of their sample of public sector workers travelling more than 40 minutes to work.

Multiple caring responsibilities

Most family carers of older adults have responsibility for just one older family member, but a substantial minority (ca. 30% in Bernard and Phillips’ (2007) study) were looking after two, and about a seventh after three or more people.

Employment vs. family life/social networks

About 75% of family carers in Bernard and Phillips’ (2007) study of public sector workers indicated being too tired to get involved in family activities, due to the stress of combining care responsibilities with employment. Moreover, many indicated that they could not maintain their social networks as a consequence of their dual responsibility.

Summarising our findings on the reconciliation of employment and care for older family members in Britain, we can conclude that since the mid 2000s substantial effort has been put into bringing care policy and family policy in line with the demands of an ageing society. These social policy reforms at central government level have started to raise employers’ awareness of the problem. Nevertheless, compliance with legislation is only one side of the coin. This review also highlighted that enterprise-level measures and policies aimed at combining work and care commitments is at least as important, if not more important, for a successful reconciliation. Thereby, the relationship of employees with their line managers and the latter’s awareness of and sensitivity in handling the issue is crucial. Finally, there is no perfect solution for all instances – different industries come with varying problems requiring slightly different approaches.

Implications for science and technology

This paper’s state-of-the-art review reported on the current situation of working family carers in the context of changing family structures and working environments. This review identified trends indicating future directions of change and implications for informal care giving and formal care provision, both with regard to children and older adults. In the following second part of this paper, we will discuss implications of these developments for a successful reconciliation of employment and caring responsibilities with a particular focus on the contribution science, technology and education can make. Next, a number of technological innovations will be introduced and their potential to change the nature of caring for somebody will be discussed.

Recent developments in care assisting technologies

Technological assistance can become a major asset in supporting individuals to continue living autonomously and independently in their own homes until very old age. More specifically, they can enable people with physical impairments, the majority of them are older people, to perform basic activities of daily living (ADLs), such as eating, bathing and dressing, as well as instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs), including cooking meals, administering medication, doing the laundry (Melenhorst, Rogers and Fisk, 2007).

Assistive devices

Much of the information in this section was provided by Mann and Helal (Mann and Helal, 2007).

Assisting with physical impairment

There are more devices to assist people suffering a physical impairment than for any other impairment. Such devices assist with mobility, manual tasks, bathing, eating, washing, dressing, leisure activities, driving, etc. Canes are the simplest and most commonly used means of assistive technology. However, they have major disadvantages due to their risky use quite often resulting in falls. Walkers are safer to use but people also reported problems using them. In the meantime, significant improvements have been made to walkers and they now come in new shapes, with seats, shopping baskets, wheels and brakes. Other commonly used tools are benches or chairs to be used in the bathtub or shower, which also have become much lighter over recent years.

Assisting with vision impairment

There is a wide range of compensatory devices to improve low vision, making use of different technologies. Magnifiers have been in use for a long time, although they have become more sophisticated in recent years. More recent developments in optical devices include high-powered lenses and telescopic spectacles. Other technologies to improve vision include illumination techniques, devices that enhance contrast, tools to memorise locations or auditory and tactile feedback mechanisms. Flashing beacons could be used to gain the user’s attention. But even low-tech solutions like using large print or highlighting text by using felt-tip markers may have a significant effect.

Assisting with hearing impairment

In the early 1990s, older Americans made use of a variety of hearing aids (Mann et al (1994) counted an average of 11.5 devices per person) but none of them resulted in substantial improvements as measured by user satisfaction (Mann, Hurren and Tomita, 1994). But while past hearing aids merely increased the volume of sound, more recent advances include digital gadgets that adjust the pitch of the sounds received to ideal levels for individual users. Vibrating pagers can be used to warn the user of potential dangers and can be linked with ’smart home’ technologies. The latest fashion is the use of cochlear implants.

Assisting with cognitive impairment

Tools used to help people with cognitive impairments include memory aids, to be used to stimulate social interaction. With the arrival and widespread use of computer-based technology a new world of opportunities for improving cognitively impaired people’s circumstances has opened up. This includes handheld devices which prompt the user with various tasks to be completed, and monitor whether or not they were indeed completed. This ranges from simple daily activities to administering medication. The most sophisticated health monitoring devices allows the user to record blood pressure, heart rate, weight, oxygen saturation and blood glucose levels. They can also be programmed to ask the user a series of clinical questions each day and to prompt her/him with reminders or self care advice.

Telecare

Working from home is seen as an important means of reconciling employment and family care (Bernard and Phillips, 2007). Advances in computing and other means of communication technology enable workers in many industries to keep in touch with work processes without being physically present. However, this could also work the other way round: recent advances in monitoring technology and the arrival of so-called ’smart-home technologies’ – for the sake of convenience labelled ‘telecare’ in the following – can help family carers to monitor the person in their care while working in their usual workplace. Telecare has the potential to give the concept of reconciling employment and care a completely new meaning by allowing both responsibilities to be carried out simultaneously, literally at the same time. Below, we will have a closer look at the technology available today to do that, which is often referred to as ’smart homes’. The detailed information on these assistive technologies was provided by Carers UK (Carers UK, 2008b).

Telecare consists of various sensors placed around the care recipient’s home, which are all linked to a control unit that can be controlled using a telephone line. The control unit looks like an answering machine sitting next to the telephone. It receives radio signals from the sensors in the home, triggering an alarm if something is wrong. It also comes with microphone and speaker enabling carer and care recipient to communicate directly. The carer could also carry a pager, which is linked to the control unit. A variety of sensors are linked to the control unit, all taking care of specific aspects of monitoring.

Movement sensors can detect any movements in a room/house using infra red sensors. They can also be used to identify lack of movement, possibly indicating a fall, in which case it would raise an alarm with the carer. Fall detectors can be clipped to the care recipient’s clothing or could be worn around the waist in a pouch. If a person wearing a fall detector experiences a fall and remains lying down for a specified period of time it will raise an alarm.

Even a severely disabled person confined to bed can be monitored this way. So-called bed occupancy sensors raise an alarm if the occupant leaves the bed and doesn’t return after a certain time period (for example, if someone experienced a fall). Equivalent systems exist for chairs. These are pressure pads fitted under mattresses, which may even set off an alarm if the occupant stops moving in the bed. These sensors are so sensitive that they can determine if a person is still breathing. Enuresis sensors can be placed under the top sheet and would raise an alarm when they detect moisture. Pillow alert solutions are vibrating pads placed under the pillow and linked to a smoke detector. If dangerous levels of smoke are detected, the detector vibrates to wake the user. It also features a strobe light when the user is out of bed.

Changes in the environment potentially perilous to the care recipient can also be detected. Temperature extremes sensors can raise an alarm if they detect excessively high or low temperatures. They are less likely to set off false alarms than smoke detectors and have the additional advantage of detecting low temperatures, which could put a person at risk of hypothermia. Flood detectors can be placed under a sink, bath, toilet, washing machine, or fridge and raise an alarm in case of flooding. Gas shut off valve solutions combine a gas detector with a gas shut off valve. When gas is leaking, the gas supply is immediately switched off and the user as well as the carer is alerted with an audible alarm. A carbon monoxide detector can also be used in ’smart homes’.

The ’smart home’ is completed by installing various property protection measures to prevent intruders from getting into the home or the care recipient leaving the home and becoming a danger to herself/himself. Property exit sensors can be placed on front/back doors to monitor people leaving the home at previously set times of the day. They can also detect if a door is left open for a long time or the person who left does not return within a previously specified period of time. In any of these cases, it alerts the carer. Door entry systems link television with the control unit and the telephone. Using this system, the carer can identify a caller visually and audibly and open the door remotely. A bogus caller button can be fixed near the entrance door, so that the user can raise an alarm with the carer. Moreover, these incidents are automatically recorded, which could be used in a criminal investigation.

This may all sound like science fiction, but telecare has already become reality in homes across the UK. Telecare can be recommended by social services, health care staff (e.g. community nurses, GPs), or housing officers. Users would have their needs assessed in the first instance and might then receive telecare services as part of their care package. Whether or not users are being charged for this service or are offered it free of charge varies across the UK, depending on the local authorities’ decisions regarding that matter (Carers UK, 2008b). A comparatively low-tech version that is at present still more commonly used in the UK are so-called Community Alarm Schemes. As seen in a hospital, care users have a button next to their beds or elsewhere in their homes to summon help, which links them with emergency care support services.

Implications for the future of family care

Scientific knowledge has been multiplying at exponential rates, with its translation into practical applications also happening at an ever increasing speed. Rising public awareness of population ageing, coupled with the perception of older people as a future growth market, has resulted in a situation where older people are among the first to enjoy the benefits of the latest technological advances. The above-described ’smart home’ technologies, health monitoring techniques and assistive technologies counterbalancing the impact of physical, cognitive, vision, and hearing impairment are beginning to revolutionise formal and informal care provision. No doubt these technologies will make it easier for family carers to combine their care giving responsibilities with employment. The technology would enable them to combine working and caring simultaneously. Moreover, the care giver will not be restricted in her/his job choice by concerns about geographical proximity to the care recipient’s home.

Initially, establishing monitoring systems like that would mean a substantial financial investment – to families, to local authorities, or to the NHS. However, in the long run these technical solutions will pay off quickly, enabling the primary carer and other family members involved in care giving working full-time, without having to worry about what might happen to their next of kin in need of care during their absence. Installing such technical solutions also make a lot of sense from an employer’s point of view who wants to retain valuable members of staff and would like to avoid any interruptions to work processes. Employers may therefore consider encouraging employees with family care commitments to install such technologies or even share the costs of doing so.

Impressive as a ’smart home’ may look if all technological gadgets are taken together, it has a slight flaw: it assigns the resident the passive role of being monitored and (remotely) controlled, contradicting the ideal of autonomous and independent living until very old age. This may be justified in certain circumstances, but making it the rule would put the intimate, loving nature of the caring relationship, discussed in the state-of-the-art review, at risk. There are, however, also technologies that give care recipients a more active role. The ‘gesture pendant’ developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology is an example. It is a wireless remote device to be worn around the neck that recognises and translates gestures into commands for home appliances (Starner et al, 2000; Melenhorst et al, 2007). The device is equipped with a camera and motion sensors. It enables residents of a ’smart home’ to give the house commands in the form of hand movements rather than performing these tasks themselves. Such tasks can include closing the blinds, locking/opening the doors, dimming the light, raising the thermostat, etc. A challenge for future technological development would be focusing more attention on improving the care recipient’s quality of life.

Education as key element of a good work-life balance

The paper concludes by suggesting future directions for educational development to achieve a well-adjusted work-life-balance in an ageing society. Obviously, the above discussed rapid advances in technology would not have been possible without the educational revolution of the 1960s and the PC/internet revolution of the 1990s. In the ‘knowledge societies’ we are living in knowledge has become the most important resource und production factor. However, this turns out to be both a blessing and a curse. The ‘knowledge society’ produces new knowledge at ever-increasing rates, within ever-shorter periods of time. As a consequence, previous knowledge is outdated and devalued at a rapid pace. Skills and knowledge must be refreshed every couple of years. Professional qualifications obtained two or three decades ago no longer guarantee a job. Increasing global competition adds to uncertainties about future career prospects. The emergence of these new risks demands new solutions.

The best coping strategy for survival in this uncertain social environment is life-long learning. Life-long learning is required to continuously adapt one’s skills and abilities to a rapidly changing environment. Life-long learning also enables adaptation to changing labour market demands, which may make certain qualifications obsolete and offer opportunities for others.

Therefore, early education in the parental home as well as in nurseries and pre-school facilities lay the foundation for future success or failure. Failure to acquire basic educational skills, including learning how to learn, will result in reduced life chances, and ultimately deprivation and social exclusion throughout the life course. A forward-looking educational policy should therefore invest maximum effort in the early stages of life to equip everybody with the tools for life-long learning. Furthermore, people who did not have these opportunities during their school years should be offered specific training for to acquire these skills. This is a precondition for realising the full benefit of life-long learning as an adaptation strategy throughout the life course. Educational investments in the early years of life will reap the highest returns throughout the life course, eventually also working to the benefit of older people.

The internet is an example that shows how new technologies can be used to the benefit of older adults, if they are educated and trained in using it. The internet has the potential to smooth the transition into older adulthood, and much more so than the invention of the telephone, since it “… allows expanded opportunities for communication, accessing information and resources, and performing routine activities such as shopping.” (Czaja and Lee, 2007, p241) The internet can help to mitigate social isolation, particularly for people from isolated rural areas and with transport issues, by making communication with friends and family easier, as well as engaging with internet communities. A recent European study shows that grandparents are partly using the internet for keeping in touch with their grandchildren, but only if they live a long distance away (Quadrello et al, 2005).

Moreover, the internet can enhance educational and employment opportunities for older workers by enabling them to access work-related information without physically being in the workplace, thus offering new options of working from home. The internet gives easy access to health care information, and to infrastructure (eg banking, shopping, or libraries) not easily accessible otherwise, which would particularly benefit people living in remote areas or those suffering from physical impairments. In short, educating older people to use the internet carries all the hallmarks of ’successful ageing’, particularly in rural areas.

In spite of growing numbers of older people using the internet, they are still clearly under-represented compared with other age groups (Czaja and Lee, 2007). Whereas the vast majority of 83% of British men aged 16-24 years and 76% of those aged 25-54 years use the internet at least once a week, only 50% of those aged 55-74 years do the same (Smihily, 2007). Thereby, older women are particularly deprived of internet access. According to recent American research, seniors who access the internet tend to be male, highly educated and affluent (Czaja and Lee, 2007). Therefore, the EU is investing much effort in improving older people’s computer skills and internet access to avoid the emergence of a new dimension of social exclusion (Hoff, 2008).

Another form of learning – intergenerational learning – can become part of the answer as well. Until today, most intergenerational learning still takes place within the family, where, thanks to ever rising life expectancies, grandparents and grandchildren can engage in leisure activities very different from the past. What is new, however, is the idea that intergenerational learning works in both directions (Luescher and Liegle, 2003). Not only do parents and grandparents educate their children and grandchildren, but children teach their parents and grandparents too. Common examples refer to the use of internet and computer technology, mobile phones and how to write text messages, how to download music from the internet and to transfer it to an MP3 player, etc. But the exchange of skills and knowledge goes well beyond such everyday examples. Grandparents were identified as guardians of family history (Reitzes and Mutran, 2004) who pass on this knowledge to the younger generations. Grandchildren, on the other hand, share their view of the world with the older generations, thereby helping grandparents and parents to keep up with new developments in our rapidly changing societies.

The emergence of new family forms and increasing numbers of single and childless households has resulted in public concern about the future of intergenerational relations. Intergenerational projects run by voluntary sector organisations can play an important role in educating older people in using the internet and other computer technology. As examples from all across Europe show, young people are only too often happy to volunteer teaching older adults these skills (examples of such projects can be found in Hoff, 2008).

Life-long learning has become the key to continuous adaptation of people of all ages to ever-changing demands in the labour market. Precondition for success are specific skills – the skills of learning how to learn. It is one of the main challenges of our dynamic knowledge societies to transfer such skills to older and younger workers alike to avoid the persistence of old or the emergence of new social inequalities. Intergenerational learning can make a significant contribution to the transfer of such skills – in families, in the voluntary sector and in formal education. What is needed in the future is intergenerational co-operation rather than intergenerational conflict. In the workplace, age-integrated work teams of older and younger employees working together appear to be best suited to provide the required mix of skills and knowledge (Boersch-Supan et al, 2005).

Intergenerational learning is also an essential precondition for the preservation of local knowledge, such as local history or rare craft skills (Hoff, 2007). Such local knowledge can be re-vitalised and used to a local community’s advantage, for example, by creating tourist attractions. But it also helps scientists to better understand the evolution of domestic animals or technologies – to mention only a few examples. In some cases, this can lead to new employment opportunities. Yet the relationship between local, traditional, lay, and expert knowledge is a very complex and dynamic process, as the local knowledge is embedded in the local context.

In short, education policy will have to be adjusted to cater for the needs of an ageing society. This implies a change in the ways of teaching for all generations, not just for the older ones. Learning how to learn would enable individuals to help themselves throughout their lives, thus reducing their reliance on state support and public expenditure. Additionally, teaching curricula for students of all ages will have to be changed in the light of the current transformation of Britain into an ageing society. Among many other things, this could include information on older people’s specific needs, the benefits of intergenerational interaction, the reconciliation of employment and care for older as well as for younger family members. Education in an ageing society would also mean making sure that professionals working with older people are appropriately trained in using state-of-the-art technologies like the ones described above. Likewise, people working in care for many years already should be offered the chance to update their knowledge and skills on a more frequent basis than commonly practiced. In the long run that could – and ought to – result in caring becoming a more highly-qualified occupation.

Intergenerational learning, the intergenerational exchange of knowledge and skills, as well as adjusting school and training curricula to the needs of an ageing society can become a vital adaptation strategy for young and old in the knowledge society. A mix of experience and openness toward new developments is most likely to generate this adaptability. The young, the middle-aged and the older generations improve their employment prospects by learning from each other and by teaching each other, thus sharing their specific strengths. This intergenerational exchange influences the employment chances/choices and the working capacity of all generations, individually and at the workplace, and thus the potential of our societies for generating economic growth.

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This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

In the last few decades, the population of Britain has experienced a steady increase which can be attributed primarily to net migration and the declining number of deaths rather than a rising number of births (Office for National Statistics, 2008). With the UK facing a future of the ageing structure shifting to the right, questions naturally rise about the organization of society, the provision of social services and the adjustment of the labour force. Amongst those, the possible role of ethnicity in mitigating the negative effects of the demographic change occupies a primary focus.

Several indications exist how ethnic minority groups may have a beneficial effect upon Britain’s ageing population. First, minorities frequently have a larger number of dependent children in the household than the UK-born White (Office for National Statistics, 2008). Moreover, there is no evidence to suggest that the delaying of family formation and childbirth characteristic of White British households would affect Asian migrant or Asian British households in the same magnitude (Modood et al, 1997). In this way, it could be expected that the importance of ethnic households for the correction of the downward trends in the number of births would become more pronounced in the future.

Next, the overall ageing of the British population would continue to create job vacancies in all sectors and especially in low-skilled manual work. Unlike skilled work in which the impact of the demographic change can be softened by adult and life-long training schemes and longevity of the employees, unskilled and low-skilled work, with its dependence upon physical conditions, is bound to receive a hard blow. It could be argued that low-skilled jobs would become more and more mechanized, or disappear in certain industries, yet recent research shows that complete substitution of manual labour is hard to envisage in the next 40 years (Handel, 2003). Furthermore, in sectors such as health and social services shortages of skilled labour are felt even now and these vacancies are primarily filled by immigrants. For example, according to the Learning and Skills Council, 679,000 vacancies in health and social work, business services, hotels, catering, and construction were available in 2003 (Selective Admission: Making Migration Work, 2004).

These prospects bring to the forefront the issues of the integration and the successful incorporation of ethnic minority groups – both first and second generation ones. This paper will examine the progress achieved in this direction, as well as commenting on undergoing and possible future changes in the organization of ethnic groups in Britain. This paper will also strive to convey the need for long-term programmes to resolve the gaps between ethnic minorities and UK-born Whites.

The first half of the paper will present the laws governing the processes of immigration and naturalization and will dwell on some characteristic patterns in family structure and labour market performance of the ethnic minority groups in Britain. It will show that segregation continues to operate and that despite the existence of extensive anti-discrimination legislation the labour market performance of the majority and minority groups is still quite divergent even for second generation minority members educated in Britain.

The second half of this paper (sections Social Resources and Host Country Institutions, and the Europeanisation of the Migration Waves) will introduce new evidence of the differentiating availability of social resources on the part of ethnic minority groups and their impact upon their labour market trajectories. The role of host country institutions in facilitating minority members and securing their incorporation will also be discussed and possible future developments will be outlined. In addition, some new research on the latest migration flows – the increasing share of White migrants in the post-1990s migration waves – and the change in societal perceptions and attitudes will be discussed. Finally, some predictions for the future of British minority groups and their labour market inclusion will be offered. Thus, the present paper will give some insight into the ongoing changes within Britain’s ethnic groups and the challenges that might be faced by them in a future of rapid demographic transitions.

Ethnicity in Britain

According to the 2001 Census, the majority of the UK population were White (92%). The remaining 4.6 million people belonged to different ethnic groups. Amongst those, Indians were the largest community followed by Pakistanis, people of Mixed Ethnicity, Black Caribbeans, Black Africans and Bangladeshis. Around half of the non-White population were Asians of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin (Office for National Statistics, 2008).

Table 1: Population of the United Kingdom: by ethnic group, April 2001

Source: Office for National Statistics, 2008

The ethnic composition of Britain thus reflects the strong links between Britain and its former colonies and areas of influence and interest, nowadays known as the British Commonwealth – New Commonwealth and Old Commonwealth countries³ inclusive.

Immigration and naturalisation laws

One of the main reasons for the population growth in Britain as already stated is net migration. In mid-2007, the population of the United Kingdom was estimated to be 60,975,000 (Office for National Statistics, 2008). In comparison with 2006, an increase of 388,000 was witnessed which equalled approximately 1,000 people a day. Net migration rather than natural change is responsible for this boom in population growth. For example, in 2002 net migration accounted for more than 70% of the total population change (Office for National Statistics, 2008). Therefore, it is of great importance to understand the operation of the immigration system and its supply and demand sides.

Graph 1: Comparison between the shares of Natural Change and Net Migration in the UK Population Change

Source: Office for National Statistics, 2008.

The main routes of migration to Britain are labour migration, family reunion and asylum. Control over the flow of labour migrants to the UK has been primarily exercised through the Work Permit System. Work permits were first introduced in 1919 to restrict the entry of Non-Commonwealth migrants, but with the enactment of the 1971 Immigration Act they became obligatory for all foreign workers from outside the European Economic Community. The latter act was aimed at curbing the increasing number of Black and Asian Commonwealth migrants. The system has undergone continuous change in the Acts⁴ following the 1971 Immigration Act to meet the shortages of labour in certain sectors such as hospitality and food processing, and has become increasingly orientated towards the facilitation of the entry of highly-skilled migrants.

The current Managed Migration policies of the British Government are best reflected in the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act, 2002. For example, apart from the main work permit scheme for skilled migrants, the Highly Skilled Migrants Programme (HSMP) was introduced in 2002 which allows workers to move to the UK without having prior job offers. Low-skilled and semi-skilled workers have been managed by the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Scheme (SAWS); the au-pair scheme, officially a cultural exchange scheme rather than a labour immigration programme; the domestic worker scheme for domestic workers who travel to the UK with their employers, and the Sector Based Scheme⁵ (SBS) which allows UK employers to recruit a limited number of workers to fill vacancies in particular sectors (Ruhs, 2006). All work permit holders are invited to apply for an indefinite period of settlement in the UK after five years. Self-employed entrepreneurs have not been under the obligation to apply for a work permit.

Control has certainly tightened over family migration as well. The 1971 Immigration Act put severe restrictions upon family reunification and chain migration. Different regulations⁶ have also been implemented to lower the number of other dependents, and to limit family migration only to spouses and children (Berkeley et al, 2005).

In contrast, the number of asylum seekers in the UK started growing in the 1990s. The trend holds for the rest of Northern Europe with a high number of asylum seekers settling in Germany and the Netherlands as well. A further increase was witnessed between 1999 and 2002, and in 2002 the number of asylum seekers in Britain peaked to 84,100 (Home Office Research and Statistics Department, 2007). Subsequently, there has been a decrease in the number of asylum seekers due to the stricter regulations of the 2002 Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act. Unlike labour migrants, asylum seekers benefit from facilitated access to state-provided support and accommodation, and there are no restrictions on their period of stay (Gardner, 2006).

On the whole, British governments have moved over the years towards the imposition of more severe restrictions upon all channels of migration. A period of ‘leniency’ has always been followed by a period of tightening of the rules: consider the great number of refugee applications in 2000-2001 and consequential introduction of new restrictions upon refugee entry in 2002. At the same time, no real drop in the number of incoming migrants has been witnessed (Heath and Cheung, 2007), as vacancies within the economy clearly exist and hence the demand remains for migrant labour. That the idea of the integration of migrants is becoming more and more part of the political discourse is evident in the change of legislation to facilitate highly-skilled migrants or migrants who have received British education and have higher awareness of British culture (and in this way will constitute an easily assimilated pool of labour 20 years from now). In contrast, restrictions have been imposed upon low-skilled labour migrants with the introduction of sector-based quotas and the seasonal workers scheme although these vacancies continue to constitute the primary pull of migrants to the UK (Ruhs, 2006).

Many of the latter vacancies are advertised as only permanent openings. The question of how many of the migrants move to another job after the expiration of their contract or reside illegally in the UK, however, remains unanswered. This is an issue of great speculation. After the enlargement of the EU in 2004 and the underestimation of the migration flows from the new EU10 countries, the British media has become more and more focused on migration and problems associated with housing shortages, labour market competition and crime, although the link between the latter and international migration has been only spurious (The Guardian, 2008). Thus, fluctuations in public opinion are likely to arise in the future as well and will depend very much on the group size, level of visibility and integration of the migrants, especially during times of harsh economic conditions. We could assume that in the next 40 to 60 years the understanding of other cultures and increased opportunities for mobility will facilitate the integration of migrants. Yet, the visibility of ethnic groups will not necessarily disappear and if shortages of labour continue to dominate in unskilled and low-skilled jobs, the migrants filling them will not necessarily be drawn from the upper tail of the skill distribution in their countries of origin. This issue will be discussed in greater length in the second section of this paper.

Naturalization

With the 1981 Naturalization Act in operation, children of immigrants born in Britain are no longer automatically British citizens unless their parents are British citizens. Immigrants who have resided in the UK for more than six years can apply for naturalization (only three years should be spent in the UK before application if the applicant’s spouse is a UK citizen).

Ethnic minority households

The Census showed that three quarters (74% per cent) of Bangldeshi households followed by 66% of Pakistani and 50% of Indian households contained at least one dependent child. In comparison, the proportion for British-born White households was 28% (Office for National Statistics, 2008).

Overall, Asian households registered the highest proportion of married couples under pension age as well as the largest proportion of more than one family with dependent children living together. Only 2% of all household in Britain could be classified in that category, whereas the percentage amongst Bangladeshis was 17%.

The level of segregation amongst the ethnic minority communities in Britain is certainly highest amongst South Asians (Modood et al, 1997) and it has been associated with the existence of cultural, linguistic, religious and aspirational differences from the mainstream institutions on the part of South Asians (Simpson, 2004). Self-segregation, however, seems a myth as Census data showed that the growing number of South Asians in certain areas can be attributed to natural growth and not to movement of South Asian residents towards areas of South Asian concentration (Simpson, 2004). Nevertheless, the issue of segregation will always present a problem since, among other reasons, the increasing concentration of minority members in certain areas can put severe constraints upon housing and the provision of social services; and thus further tilt the equality in services, resources and employment between the majority and the minorities.

Labour market performance

An important aspect and evidence for the successful integration of ethnic minority groups is parity in terms of wage and work opportunities between the minorities and the native majority. The demographic changes in the British population and the need for younger workers are likely to further push towards the closing of the existing gaps. Whether that happens easily, however, is a totally different question. In this section, the progress made in the last few decades within the enactment of stringent anti-discrimination laws will be overviewed and some areas of major concern will be highlighted.

It is generally believed that in comparison with the 1960s the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s were characterized by convergence of the economic profiles of the ethnic minority groups and the White British workforce (Ignaski and Payne, 1996). The immigrants’ labour market performance seemed to improve perhaps with the acquisition of human capital (Fielding, 1995); the arrival of better qualified migrants drawn from the upper tail distribution of the human capital in their home countries (Bell, 1997); the introduction of a series of anti-discrimination laws, and/or simply the nature of the labour market which registered economic expansion (Bell, 1997). Some researchers question, however, these optimistic findings (Modood et al, 1997), arguing that they were based on aggregate data that did not distinguish between first and second generation minority members and consecutively overstated the declining trend in ethnic minority disadvantage. This is to say that ethnic minorities in the 1980s and early 1990s compared to the 1960s might have been taking better jobs, but they were still doing so to a lesser extent than White people with the same qualifications (Modood et al, 1997).

Even if there was a positive trend in the economic profile of minority groups in Britain in the 1980s, it has certainly reversed by the mid-1990s. The findings of the Fourth National Survey of Ethnic Minorities carried out in 1994 showed that Caribbeans, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis suffered substantial employment and earnings disadvantages with almost two-thirds of male respondents from these groups concentrated into manual jobs. In comparison half of the Indians, and two thirds of Chinese men were in non-manual work (Modood et al, 1997). The good representation of Chinese and South Asians, particularly Indians, in professional, managerial and employers position at the time (the 1990s) has been largely attributed to the high rate of self-employment amongst these groups (Clark and Drinkwater, 1998).

Whether integration works very much depends on the performance of second generation minority members in the labour market. The offspring raised in the host country are assumed to be doing better than their parents and to have reached parity with Whites (Chiswick, 1978). Various studies distinguish between the two generations and explore this assumption with British survey data. Simpson et al (2006), comparing the 1991 and 2001 Censuses, found that the net disadvantage of ethnic minorities in the labour market has become greater for men born in the UK. For example, unemployment amongst unqualified men in their thirties was 16% for Pakistanis born overseas, a little more than the unemployment for unqualified White males, but for Pakistanis born in the United Kingdom, it was 25%. Heath and Cheung (2006) using a cumulated sample of the General Household Survey 1979-1999 and 1992-1997 LFS datasets also reached the conclusion that in terms of avoiding unemployment, the ethnic disadvantage was stronger in the second generation rather than the first one. In their study, the disadvantage was highest for Black Caribbeans and Pakistanis. On the other hand, in terms of accessing professional and managerial positions, the ethnic disadvantage was sharply reduced in the second generation and in the case of Black Caribbeans and Indians it became insignificant (Leslie et al, 1998; Heath and Cheung, 2006).

Unfortunately due to data limitations, few studies simultaneously offer control for educational attainment and knowledge of English. An exception is an article by Dustmann and Fabbri (2000)⁷ who found that English fluency reduced the likelihood of unemployment and the earnings differentials between ethnic minorities and Whites. It is nevertheless hard to believe that lack of language proficiency can solely explain the aforementioned patterns of disadvantage as Caribbean migrants arrive with a good knowledge of English (Heath and Yu, 2005), and second generation respondents have been educated in the British system. In the study by Berthoud (2000), the members of the African minority group stayed longer in education than the respective UK-born White and Black Caribbean groups; however, their unemployment and earnings prospects were similar to those of Black Caribbeans.

One of the explanations most commonly associated with the existence of the divide described above is discrimination.

Several steps have been undertaken since the 1950s to establish equal treatment of all ethnic groups in the British labour market. First, the 1965 Race Relations Act banned ethnic discrimination at public places and was followed by the 1968 Race Relations Act which ensured that it was unlawful to discriminate on grounds of colour, race, ethnic or national origins in recruitment and terms and conditions of employment (Layton-Henry, 1984). This definition of discrimination was extended in the 1976 Race Relations Act to cover forms of implicit discrimination in which there is absence of deliberate intention to discriminate but employers’ practices still put certain ethnic groups at disadvantage (Heath and Yu, 2005). More recently, the Race Relations Act 2000 was instituted to maintain the provisions of the previous act and to encourage public authorities to fight discrimination. Nevertheless, as will be highlighted, field experiments and attitudinal studies indicate that both indirect and direct discrimination continues to shape the labour market outcomes of minority members in Britain.

The Home Office Citizenship Survey, for example, has registered a steady increase in the perception of prejudice and discrimination in the British society from 2003 to 2005 (Home Office Citizenship Survey, 2003, 2005). Arguably, however, the White British population does not exhibit higher levels of prejudice towards a particular Commonwealth group. Waters (1999), comparing the US and the UK, claimed that to be ‘black‘ in Britain entails that the person is simply ‘non-white’ and there is no ethnic hierarchy as observed in the US. However, the evidence in favour of the reduction of the racial distinctions to ‘whites’ versus ‘non-whites’ in the British case is not exemplary strong. The field experiments conducted in the UK on which we can rely for some insight into the operation of discrimination in the hiring process are outdated and have some serious flaws. The majority of them do not distinguish between the different ethnic minority communities, often grouping West Indian and Asian testers under the term of ‘black applicants’ or ‘coloured’ applicants (Firth, 1981). Consider the generality of the evidence provided by the 1966 Political and Economic Planning (PEP) study which found that when comparing ‘coloured’ applicants (presumably Black Caribbeans, Indians or Pakistanis) and White migrant applicants, the latter experienced much less disadvantage (Daniel, 1968). Jowell and Prescott-Clarke (1970) obtained similar results for white-collar jobs. More recently, Hoque and Noon (1999) claimed that there is little discrimination against Asians in big companies but most of their fake applicants had Hindu-sounding names implying that they belonged to the Indian minority group which renders the extension of Hoque and Noon’s results to the Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities impossible. It is true that those studies distinguishing between Black Caribbeans and Asians usually have registered the same level of prejudice against both groups (Brown and Gay, 1994) or a slightly higher level of prejudice against Black Caribbeans (McIntosh and Smith, 1974). Yet, better up-to-date data⁸ is needed with detailed ethnic groupings, as so far the conclusion that British-born Whites do not discriminate against a specific migrant group relies on a data that does not make a very clear initial distinction between the minority groups in Britain.

Attitudinal studies and self-reported feelings of discrimination perhaps do not provide as good systematic evidence of discrimination in the employment process as field experiments but they can attest to existent prejudices. In the Fourth National Survey of Ethnic Minorities, Bangladeshis and Asians reported lower feelings of discrimination, while members of the Black group especially Black Caribbeans had higher levels of self-reported discrimination: over a quarter of the Caribbeans believed that they had been refused a job on racial grounds (Modood et al, 1997). Since there is a direct negative correlation between feelings of discrimination and trust in institutions (Home Office Citizenship Survey, 2005) and for Black Caribbeans the levels of the latter are usually low (Berthoud, 2000), it is still unclear whether these statistics reflect the true levels of discrimination in the host country or simply perceptions and beliefs of it.

Clearly, over the last few decades, despite the development of extensive anti-discrimination legislation, the ethnic minority groups have been exposed to labour market penalties, and parity with native Whites has not been achieved. Moreover, there are some serious gaps in our knowledge of discrimination in the British labour market that must be filled before any specific strategies for the labour market integration of minority groups are adopted. Indeed, a close monitoring of the level of discrimination will be in order if a more homogenous and equal labour market is to be uncovered in the next 20 years.

The next section of this paper will dwell in detail on new research which tries to throw light on ethnic penalties¹⁰ and possible future developments that may present yet another range of challenges to the ethnic organization of the British society.

Social resources and host country institutions

The second half of this paper focuses on some new research pointing out to the challenges in resolving the gap between UK-born Whites and minority members, and the steps that can be undertaken to ensure the achievment of parity. Researchers believe that overt discrimination¹⁰ may not be the only reason for the penalized position of minority groups in Britain. Ethnic minority members might simply lack the resources and the social networks to gain profitable information about vacancies and obtain those (Peterson et al, 2000). Therefore, before examining the issue of whether an employer hires an individual of ethnic minority origin and on what terms, attention should be paid to the question of whether the ethnic minority member has even heard about the job due to his/her limited social resources.

In my doctoral research which uses the job search behaviour of ethnic minority members in Britain as a proxy for the social resources¹¹ available to them, I find that there is a distinct divide between the members of the Black group and South Asians in the use of social ties which is more pronounced in the first generation than in the second. South Asians rely more on social ties, all things considered. Nevertheless, the indication that when social ties have been used in the second generation, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are more unlikely to exit unemployment than British-born Whites and members of the Black group; and that South Asian minorities are less successful in reaching the highest occupational positions through social ties compared to British-born Whites suggests that the ties of groups with assumed high levels of bonding capital¹³ are weak and not strong enough to facilitate the gaining of employment.

On the other hand, state employment agencies are a technique very popular among ethnic minorities – even amongst those with a characteristically low possession of English (such as Pakistanis and Bangladeshis). State employment agencies indeed are institutions designed to cater primarily for the needs of the unemployed, and to offer help and advice; however, they are also likely to provide low-skilled to medium level jobs. The fact that many of the minority groups with control for education continue to rely on them and exit unemployment successfully may indicate that minorities value the reliability of state employment agencies, the quickness with which jobs are offered (including jobs in the public sector), and the strict operation of the government’s non-discrimination laws compared to the general labour market climate; and favour these factors over high remuneration.

In fact, it is in this heightened use of state employment agencies with control for benefit claiming that the government policies of the incorporation of ethnic minority members register a clear success. State employment agencies seem to have a particular understanding of the different needs of ethnic groups. To maintain a contact with Pakistani and Bangladeshi job seekers, for example, Career Offices offered the flexibility of written applications to them (Johnson and Fidler, 2005). Minority members registered with state employment agencies enjoy the beneficial effect of a number of minority orientated government policies (Tackey et al, 2006) – eg finding the applicants jobs within the local area, raising awareness about available facilities in the neighbourhood (crèches and day care), and encouraging desegregation by assisting minority members in their application for jobs in other geographical areas. The latter strategy is certainly less successful with impersonal intermediaries such as newspaper advertisements which are rarely consulted by minority members even in the second generation, as my research shows.

Undoubtedly, the policies channelled by state employment agencies are indicative of the government’s commitment to the integration of minority groups and the acknowledgement of the importance of providing information and resources to minorities. Yet, there are many ways for improvement in the future. State employment agencies usually offer primarily semi-skilled and unskilled jobs, and a few professional positions in the public sector (Tackey et al, 2006). As the current legislation stands, employers have to advertise their vacancies without discriminating on the basis of gender, age or ethnicity, but the medium of magazines and newspaper advertisements, as my research suggests, is not enough to reach the potential ethnic minority applicants successfully. In fact, minorities frequently prefer to have a mediator (Tackey et al, 2006) in their contact with employers, perhaps due to fears of discrimination (which holds in the second generation as well) or simply lack of knowledge about the operation of the host labour market (Friedberg, 2000). Even with the globalization of the world’s labour markets, it is unlikely that the need for consulting agencies and seeking assistance will totally disappear.

Both state and private employment agencies can take up this role. So far, however, private employment agencies – a possible alternative source of information and help for highly-skilled individuals – have not entirely acted as the agent through which professional placements can be secured. Private employment agencies are indeed crucial in the recruitment of migrant work but they are also frequently involved with the placement of the migrants in low-skilled sector-based vacancies such as Social services or Transport and Communications (Ruhs, 2006). In some cases, private employment agencies have been involved in complex schemes of perpetuating irregular migration by offering migrants jobs as sub-contractors for food and packaging companies (The Guardian, 2005). More objective research on these issues is, of course, needed; yet, state employment agencies seem the only host country institutions that strictly operate by the government policies and laws.

Europeanisation of the migrant waves

British immigration policy in the last 20 years has been orientated towards the ‘Europeanisation’ of labour recruitment, and of creating a more coherent labour market in which migrants blend more easily, although the dependence upon Commonwealth labour has continued particularly in health and education (Sales, 2007). The attempts at ‘Europeanisation’ peaked with the decision to grant free labour access to the new accession countries in 2004. In the context of the ageing British population, this strategy seems to ensure the presence of European migrants that are likely to adapt more easily to the British culture and labour market. However, public opinion has not been very relaxed towards these new migrants and many fluctuations within the government policy have also been witnessed.

White migrants have always been considered non-’visible’. Since up to the 1990s they were primarily skilled migrants from EU-15 and Old Commonwealth countries or Irish, they were often also described as less ‘problematic’ (Sales, 2007). This rhetoric, and the fact that even in the 1990s Commonwealth migrants still dominated the migration waves, masked the important changes under way in British society. For example, the share of Old and New Commonwealth migrants diminished greatly from 30% and 32% of the migrants in 1971 to 17% and 20% of the migrants in 2002 (Berkeley et al, 2005). On the other hand, the proportion of Eastern European and Middle Eastern migrants has steadily increased. The latter trend went unnoticed by the general public for quite awhile as in 2001 the number of Eastern Europeans living in Britain was relatively low – fewer than 100,000 or roughly 3% of the population (Office for National Statistics, 2008). Consecutively, in the 2001 British Attitudes Survey, Commonwealth migrants were still recognized as the most visible group of migrants and the reported levels of indirect discrimination were higher against New Commonwealth migrants than against migrants from other European countries (Rothon and Heath, 2003).

Attitudes of the British White majority certainly started to change with the enlargement of the European Union. After 2004, Britain experienced an unprecedented boom of European migrants. Only between May 2004 and March 2005, there were 176,000 applications to the New Worker registrations scheme; 56% of them were by Polish workers and 15% by Lithuanians (Accession Monitoring Report, 2004-2006). Moreover, prior to the enlargement, Central and Eastern Europeans in Britain were regarded primarily as temporary workers whose number was too small to be discussed in the debate over the incorporation of the permanently settling foreign-born. The change in figures and the dramatic increase in group size questioned the lack of ‘visibility’ of European White migrants. The concern about underestimating the number of foreigners has led even The Office for National Statistics to set up an Inter-Departmental Task Force on Migration Statistics. In this way, the enlargement of the EU drew attention to the fact that from the 1990s onwards the number of Other Whites in the UK has been constantly rising; however, their labour market performance has also become increasingly divergent (Berkeley et al, 2005; Haque, 2002; Ruhs, 2006) which questions the Europeanisation as a strategy aimed at the consolidation of the British labour market in the years to come.

The ‘Europeanisation’ of the migration waves did not quite meet the expectations in respect to age structures as well. The age profile of the coming Eastern and Central European migrants is one of a large pensioner dependency rate (Haque, 2002); which can be deemed as a sign of increased chances of return migration but is not particularly likely to assist in the correction of Britain’s ageing population.

Graph 2: Old Age Dependency Rate

Source: Haque, 2002

In terms of labour market performance, my research (Demireva, forthcoming) based on combined 1998-2005 LFS datasets shows that Central and Eastern Europeans are concentrated in skilled manual and low-skilled work. Both groups, however, experience high levels of penalization in terms of their participation rates. In terms of access to Professional positions, the disadvantage of Eastern Europeans disappears after control for education; but EU10 migrants remain continuously penalized. Perhaps, this could be explained with the fall of work permits for EU10 migrants. Under the operation of the Work Permit Scheme, a small proportion of highly qualified migrants are recruited for professional jobs and the rest are recruited for low-paid sector-based or seasonal work. Thus, a pre-selection of the quality level of migrants exists, which translates into a lower disadvantage as to salariat jobs of the work permit holders but over-representation of skilled workers into unqualified positions with little opportunity for social mobility as there are no Intermediate vacancies.

How can the disadvantage of permit-exempted migrants be stronger? According to data from the Accession Monitoring Report of the Home Office for 2004-2006, most EU10 migrants are employed in relatively low-skilled seasonal jobs with great turnover (Accession Monitoring Report, 2004-2006). If indeed EU10 migrants perceive their stay as temporary they might be reluctant to invest in host country specific capital and prefer short-term work with quick returns using the labour market in their home countries as ‘a primary frame of reference’ (Piore, 1979). More research is, of course, needed on this topic and a comparison of the performance of Central and Eastern European migrants before and after accession to the EU can be very interesting and important for the understanding of the work permit policies and their influence in the labour market.

In addition, special attention should be paid to self-employment. Both men and women from EU10 countries, Eastern Europe, Old Commonwealth and Old migrants have greater odds than UK-born Whites to be self-employed rather than have an unqualified job with control for individual characteristics (Demireva, forthcoming). Interestingly, New Commonwealth men and migrants from Hong Kong, China and Japan, who are traditionally associated with self-employment amongst the older migrant cohorts, have lower odds of being independent entrepreneurs than UK-born Whites¹³. Perhaps, this is a result of a saturation effect for Commonwealth and Chinese entrepreneurs in the Distributive sector while new opportunities for self-employment open in Construction predominated by EU10 and Eastern European migrants (Ruhs, 2006). What is more, the disadvantage against New Commonwealth and Chinese migrants (who have arrived after 1990) in the mainstream labour market is lower than the penalization of Central and Eastern European migrants as evident from their participation and employment patterns, and self-employment has always been associated with the more disadvantaged groups (Clark and Drinkwater, 1998). Finally, recent studies have implied that self-employment has been used by Central and Eastern Europeans as a way of circumventing the complicated procedure of applying for a work permit as the rates of self-employment are very high for both men and women in these groups, and many self-employers in Construction are in their turn sub-contracting (Ruhs, 2006).

Although these thriving forms of dependent self-employment have brought increased flexibility to the labour market and benefits for the British economy, the uncertainty in pay, working hours and conditions associated with them make their practice and perpetuation questionable (Boheim and Muehlberger, 2006). The issue should be studied in greater detail as dependent self-employment shows all signs of becoming the future migrant labour market niche, especially if migrant turnover increases.

The next 20 years

On the basis of the heretofore outlined patterns in migration and the incorporation of minority members into the British labour market and society in general, it is likely that over the next 20 years, three major trends will be observed.

First, minority groups will have strengthened their participation in decision-making processes due to a growing representation in authority structures. The ever-expanding size of first and second generation minority communities and their importance for the British economy is, of course, not only a matter of debate in the Home Office, but also within the minority groups; with both the realization of their role in civic society and sensitivity towards social and economic inequality on the rise (Edwards, 1995). This certainly reflects upon the improvement of the minorities’ position in government and local authorities and the described momentum will become a major driving force for changes in the future. For example, according to the annual Race Equality Report for 2008, the Home Office made good progress on the representation of ethnic minority staff, with particularly strong results for the representation of ethnic staff in London and Croydon as a whole (24%), the United Kingdom Border Agency (27.5%) and the Identity and Passport Service (13.6%). In terms of the progress made by ethnic minorities along the ranks of civil servants, in 2008 6% (4 out of 65) of Senior Civil Servants were from minority ethnic groupings¹⁴ (Race Equality Report, 2008). The increase in this representation and its extension to the local administration and councils in the future is high on the agenda of the Home Office (Race Equality Report, 2008) and even the need to achieve proportional representation of different minority groups instead of regarding them as one whole is gradually acknowledged and lobbied for (Field, 2002).

Thus, in 20 years time, I think we will have witnessed some serious steps towards the reduction of inequality, and an improvement in the labour market position of first and second generation minority members that will be largely due to active participation of the minority groups in the debate over, and the management of, the British policy.

At the same time, I envisage certain tightening of the immigration controls. The failure to produce a homogenous immigrant flow through the ‘Europeanization’ of the migrant waves even in terms of age structure will bring about the introduction of more severe requirements for work and settlement in the UK. English language fluency is most likely to be the first added requirement, especially given the warning signs and discussions in the press, and the unanimity of the general public opinion on the issue (BBC², 2007). Whereas, language barriers per se might pose less of a challenge in 20 years time with increased mobility and the presence of English in school curricula throughout the world, the debate about the need of migrants to know English can easily expand into a debate about their knowledge of British culture and suitability to become part of British society. I do not think that the current tests accompanying the process of naturalization will be extended to the entry of migrants in 2028; however, in my opinion, the discussion about the imposition of such tests will be in full force at that moment. Again, I think all minority communities will take a very lively participation in this debate, which is exactly why the institutionalizing of the evaluation of ‘Britishness’ will not happen over night. Moreover, the role of tests in positive migrant selection (Independent, 2003) is likely to be one of the future’s most contingent or at least most recurrent topics. On the other hand, these restricting measures will not be carried to extremes. For example, the imposing of absolute control over the age of prospective migrants even in 20 years time when the ageing of the British society will be felt much more explicitly, for me, remains unlikely given the predicted growth say of migrant communities in the decision-making processes.

Finally, in my opinion, vacancies in health, social services and low-skilled work will continue to afflict the British labour market of the future, which will trigger a persistent need for immigrant labour. In the health sector, particularly in the nursing and associate health professions, attempts will probably be made to raise the pay and improve the working conditions in order to encourage second generation minority members to fill the positions in which they are currently underrepresented (Field, 2002). Such practices can be instituted to placate the public fear of unethical recruitment of nurses and counteract the draining of source countries (Kingma, 2006). Yet, such positive trends are unlikely to extend to all vacancies. Negative selection of migrants and skill downgrading are still to be expected if divergence in the levels of income inequality in the source and host countries continues to exist and in more general terms manual labour is not superseded by automated labour.

Conclusion

With the British population rapidly ageing, there is a growing realization of the important role that both first and second generation ethnic minorities can play in demographic change. A great deal, however, depends upon the integration of the minority members and the reaching of parity between ethnic groups. This paper strived to show that to achieve integration the existence of differential social resources between ethnic groups should be acknowledged and programmes put in operation to correct these patterns rather than simply rely on the permeating force of the global cultural and labour market changes which will take place in the next few decades.

It could be argued that in the next 40 years, migration will not present a problem since new technologies and widespread education would guarantee the emergence of a more mobile, culturally integrated world. At the same time, many signs show that such predictions should be regarded with caution. The enlargement of the European Union is a case in point. Although research shows that migrants are centred in low-skilled and seasonal work that the British-born White have left vacant, a rise in the group size of White migrants made them more ‘visible’ and questioned their previously assumed homogeneity. Thus, the ‘Europeanisation’ of the migration waves still raised concerns about the integration and presence of migrants.

Recently, the Commission for Integration and Cohesion (BBC, 2008) pointed out that language is the single and largest barrier to the successful adaptation of minority members. Without belittling this important issue, it should be acknowledged as the present paper shows that the labour market penalties are high even for second generation minority members who have been raised and educated in Britain, and for Black Caribbean migrants. In addition, migrants are streamlined for jobs according to their skill levels – the highly-educated ones with good knowledge of English occupy professional positions and the rest are concentrated in low-skilled and semi-skilled work. The unavailability of Intermediate positions indirectly guarantees that even better-qualified migrants end up with jobs at the end of the occupational hierarchy. In this way, the problem is not that the nature of White migration has changed from English-speaking Old Commonwealth countries and the US to Central and Eastern European migrants, but the mere existence of unqualified labour.

Moreover, as the living standards are bound to improve within the European Union in the next 40 to 50 years, the ‘European’ migration wave especially for low-skilled work might shift further towards the East and even cease altogether. In which case, the negative selection of migrants is not guaranteed to disappear. A possible resolution of this situation would be to keep large migrant turnover for unskilled vacancies and further restrict settling. Yet, again, travelling distance and high migration costs will make such a decision impractical and in reality unattainable.

Building informed public opinion will also play a large role in the bridging of the gaps between the majority and minority populations. Currently, very little is known about return migration, and many of the temporary migrants are considered potential settlers which raises fears about housing, social services and general anti-migration feelings. However, the recent statistics (Office for National Statistics, 2008) showed that in mid-2007, natural change started playing a greater impact in population change and there was a decline in the net migration rate possibly due to greater return migration. The existing International Passenger Survey (Office for National Statistics, 2008) which records the purpose of stay of people entering the UK and their envisaged date of leaving the country is not enough for the patterns of return migration to be outlined. Likewise, more detailed analyses of the labour market performance of refugees are needed since on the basis of current knowledge, hardly any recommendations can be made about their future integration.

It is clear that a successful adaptation to Britain’s ageing demographic structure cannot happen without ensuring the incorporation of the minority groups already settled in Britain and the extension of the principles of fair treatment to the incoming migration waves. In a way, both are likely to be achieved through the increasing efforts of minority communities to become better represented in public authorities and participate in the decision-making processes; and through the encouragement of research in previously unexplored areas. Nevertheless, migration, equality and inclusion are still very likely to be as hot and as debatable issues in 20 years time in Britain as they are today due to the gradual pace in which the labour market transformations in global as well as local plan take place.

Notes

1. Neli Demireva is a DPhil student in Sociology at the University of Oxford at the end of her studies. Her doctoral thesis is titled “Examining ethnic minority disadvantage in the British labour market – evidence from job search behaviour”. In addition to her post-graduate research, she participated from 2006 till 2008 as a researcher in the Ethnicity and Immigration Research Group of the ‘Economic Change, Quality of Life and Social Cohesion’ (Equalsoc) Network with a specific focus on migrants arriving in the UK after the 1990s. For correspondence: Neli Demireva, St. John’s College, Oxford, OX1 3JP, email: neli.demireva@sjc.ox.ac.uk

2. Bulmer (1996) defines ethnic groups as “a collectivity within a larger population having real or putative ancestry, memories of a shared past, and a cultural focus upon one or more symbolic elements which define the group’s identity, such as kinship, religion, language, shared territory, nationality or physical appearance. Members of an ethnic group are conscious of belonging to an ethnic group” (Bulmer, 1996, p35). The term ethnic minority refers both to first and to second generation minority groups.

3. The term Old Commonwealth refers to Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The major sending countries of the New Commonwealth are India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Caribbean, Kenya and South Africa. For full list of Commonwealth states, see McIntyre, 2001. Old Commonwealth and New Commonwealth migrants constitute the largest immigrant groups both before and after 1990. Changes in their immigrant status, however, render the migrants from these communities arriving after the 1990s more similar to other labour migrants. Recent Pakistani migrants, for example, are also defined as aliens and therefore do not benefit from having special residence and work permits as some of the older colonial generation (Soysal, 1994).

4. Asylum and Immigration Act, 1996, Immigration and Asylum Act, 1999, Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act, 2002, and most recently in the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act, 2006.

5. The SBS currently only applies to nationals from Bulgaria and Romania. The programme was scheduled to be phased out by 31 December 2006, but was retained for both nations upon their accession to the European Union on 01 January 2007.

6. The 1981 British Nationality Act introduced the primary purpose rule under which an immigration officer could deny entry to spouse or fiancee if the primary purpose of marriage was immigration.

7. The study is based on data from the Fourth National Survey of Ethnic Minorities and the Family and Working Lives Survey for 1994-1995.

8. Empirical economic studies can contribute little to enlighten this matter. At best, they provide only indirect evidence of discrimination by virtue of existing differentials in the wage and occupational achievements of British-born Whites and ethnic minority members. These differentials can in addition be attributed to a number of factors beside discrimination such as the aforementioned strength of social networks or degree of adaptation to the host country. Amongst the quantitative attempts at more direct evidence of discrimination, the studies using matched employer-employee data should be highlighted. Frijters et al (2006), on the basis of data from the Workplace Employee Relations Survey, showed that job satisfaction was significantly lower for White workers in workplaces with a high density of ethnic minorities, and that White male workers required a wage premium of around 12% to compensate for a move from a work place with no ethnic minorities to a work place with a higher density of ethnic minorities (Frijters et al, 2006).

9. The term ethnic penalty has been introduced to account for “any remaining disparity that persists in ethnic minorities’ chances of securing employment or higher-level jobs, or income, after taking account of their measured personal characteristics such as their qualifications, human capital and the like” (Heath and Yu, 2005, p192).

10. Patterns inconsistent with discrimination used as the sole explanation of ethnic penalization are the similar level of self-reported discrimination amongst minorities with various group economic successes (Modood et al, 1997) and the stable-over-time proportion of British-born White employers who are likely to commit basic acts of discrimination (Brown and Gay, 1994; Simpson and Stevenson, 1994). An example for the first is the particularly low level of self-reported discrimination amongst Bangladeshis – the group pointed out by all other ethnic and religious minority groups as most vulnerable – in contrast to the relatively higher perception of discrimination on the part of Indians (Modood et al, 1997). The second trend is not inconsistent with rising awareness of discrimination in the society in general and in the media discourse that will possibly lead to a situation in which the knowledge of existing discrimination outstrips the actual experience of it (Modood et al, 1997).

11. According to Portes (1995), the term social resources could be used in economic sociology to denote both the referral to the social and often co-ethnic networks available to the minority members but also to the use of the institutional settings of the host country.

12. Bonding social capital refers to relationships between similar persons (for example, those alike with respect to sociodemographic and socioeconomic characteristics), while bridging social capital refers to relationships between dissimilar persons at the same level of hierarchy (Putnam 1995).

13. The sample consists of 1998-2008 datasets. The New Commonwealth migrants referred to have arrived in Britain after the 1990s.

14. Although it should be borne in mind that only 65 out of 118 Senior Civil Servants acknowledged their ethnicity.

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This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

The 1950s and 1960s saw the emergence of a number of now well known community studies of family life in Britain. Two particularly influential studies included Michael Young and Peter Wilmott’s (1957) classic study of family and kinship in a working class area of East London, and Colin Rosser and Christopher Harris’ (1965) study of family and social change in Swansea. These studies, amongst others (Firth, 1956; Townsend, 1957) were extremely influential, revealing as they did the continuing significance of extended kinship networks in the daily life of families. As a testament to their continued importance, both studies were revisited in the early 21^st century, promising, in so doing, to shed light on half a century of social and community change (Dench et al, 2006; Charles et al ,2008). What is of particular significance, however, is how in undertaking these restudies, the researchers were faced with the challenge of “returning” to communities which had undergone considerable ethnic diversification. Thus Dench et al’s work Family and Kinship in East London becomes The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict. Charles et al’s restudy also had to incorporate Swansea’s minority ethnic population. These two particular case studies merely indicate that it is increasingly difficult to truly consider the nature of diversity and change in families in Britain without placing questions of ethnicity and multiculturalism at the centre. It can be argued that the framework of class and community has been replaced by the framework of ethnicity and multiculturalism. Either way, they provide local illustrations of how ethnic diversification resulting from international migration has become a major feature of social structure and personal relationships both in Britain and across the world.

Over a period of two decades after the Second World War, people from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and the Caribbean migrated to Britain in large numbers as a result of postwar labour shortages. Later, during the 1970s, people of South Asian origin came from Africa in response to the Ugandan and Kenyan governments’ Africanization policies. Since then, the legal entry of unskilled, non-white people has been limited to the dependents or spouses of these earlier immigrants. There has also been significant immigration of Black Africans since the 1980s. According to the 2001 census, the UK has a non-white minority ethnic population of 4.6 million, representing 7.9% of the total population. Those categorized as “Asian or Asian British” (Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and other Asian) numbered 2.3 million, comprising 4% of the UK population, whilst those termed “Black or Black British” (including Black Caribbean, Black African and Black Other) comprised 1.1 million. Not insignificant proportions (15%) of non-whites are classified as “Mixed”, around a third of whom are from white and Black Caribbean backgrounds.

The focus in this paper will be on Britain’s Asian and Black Caribbean populations making up as they do around two-thirds of the minority population. However, it is important to note that the ‘white’ category comprising 92.1% of the population also contains ethnic differences, for example, white Irish and Poles who have also migrated in large numbers over the course of the 20^th century. Rarely, for instance, do the Irish community appear in ethnically sensitive monitoring, despite evidence of their acute disadvantage. To some extent this is captured via recently added distinctions between White British, White Irish and White Other. This is likely to have added significance given the arrival of Eastern European labour migrants to the UK since EU enlargement, some of whom are becoming parents in the UK, whose children are currently attending primary schools, and who may be joined by other family members. Thus minority ethnic people should not be simply equated with non-white people.

Certain urban areas across the UK have become commonly, perhaps pejoratively, associated within the popular imagination with a strong minority presence – African Caribbeans in Brixton, South London; Punjabi Sikhs in Southall, West London; Bangladeshis in parts of East London; as well as distinctive Black and South Asian communities in the Midlands and North of England. Other ports, such as Cardiff, Liverpool, and Bristol have had notable Black populations since at least the mid 19^th century as a result of the enforced migration of Black people as part of the slave trade. It has been argued that the housing and settlement patterns of ethnic minorities have served to maintain or reproduce their sense of ethnic solidarity vis-a-vis the wider society. Community-based solidarities emerge as forms of protection against their experience of structural disadvantage, exclusion and racism. These communities, as well as voluntary organizations within them, form an important social resource for minority ethnic families; for example, offering valuable support for parents who have arrived in Britain but who have no network of support among their own family or friends living nearby. A crucial issue for policy and research is whether and how recent migrants of African or Asian background, including those who have migrated later in life, are tapping into these built-up networks. Despite the relatively younger age structure of Britain’s minority ethnic population, the generation of Black Caribbean and South Asian post-war migrants to Britain is now moving into retirement age and this raises further important social policy questions about their informal support networks, and the capacity of care and service providers to be culturally sensitive to their needs in old age (Blakemore and Boneham, 1994; Nazroo, 2006).

The presence of these communities has challenged (and continues to challenge) conventional notions of British national belonging, identity and culture and have, to some extent, contributed to a greater understanding of multicultural citizenship in the UK (Parekh, 1999). Most British-born children and grandchildren of Caribbean and South Asian migrants would consider themselves to a greater or lesser degree as British, whilst still maintaining an attachment to their parents’/grandparents’ country or region of origin. Consequently, as young adults, they may adopt and actively maintain a trans-national meaning of family, which extends beyond those residing in Britain. What is of importance is to consider how their family values and relationships reflect both their ethno-cultural background, as well as their adoption of ‘westernized’ British values. “Minoritised families” in which there has been a history of migration leading to trans-national networks thus constitute a key point of differentiation within British families. However, many of the changes occurring in minority ethnic families are also happening to varying degrees within all families, and thus are not simply specific “ethnic” features. The notion of families as exhibiting ethnic differences which are distinct from the majority entails both accurate representations and misrepresentations of reality. As a result, and before turning directly to this, it is first necessary to provide a general background to the patterns of change and diversity that are affecting all families.

Changing Families: The General Picture

In recent decades, Britain, like many countries across the developed world, has witnessed an evolving pattern of change in the nature of family structures, roles and relationships. In particular, there are significant demographic changes taking place that are having a direct influence on patterns of family formation, as well as on relationships between family members. These include shifts towards fewer marriages, more cohabitation and more births outside marriage; increases in divorce, remarriage and reconstituted families; and an increase in the proportion of lone parent and smaller families. In addition to these broad trends, population ageing and the extension of the life course, point to a renewal of multi-generational family relationships, particular with regard to the role of grandparents.

It can be argued that the major trend in current 21^st century families has been a transformation in relation to marriage. Today’s family picture reflects a shift away from the married couple family that dominated for much of the 20^th century. While it remains the case that over half of adults still live as married couples, their percentage is declining. Census figures over the second half of the 20^th century show marked declines from 68% in 1971 to just over 50% in 2001. Alongside this, and as in many European countries, the average age of marriage has increased. Parenthood is also occurring later. Kiernan (2004, p118) has shown that in the mid 1970s, the average age of first time brides in Britain was clustered in the 22-24 years old range, whereby by the year 2000 they are clustered in the late 20s, predominantly at age 27. It should also be noted that this masks considerable variation in the age of first time mothers defined by social class and education.

One of the important drivers behind these trends is the concomitant rise in cohabitation, which doubled between the 1991 and 2001 censuses. While men and women living together outside marriage is certainly not new, there are clear rises in incidence, since the 1980s, of young people living together for sustained periods either as a precursor to, or instead of, marriage. A proportion of cohabiting couples are same sex couples. Since the Civil Partnership Act came into force in January 2005, there have been over 20,000 such partnerships. The number of people living alone has also more than doubled between 1971 and 2005, from 3 to 7 million (Social Trends, 2007).

One change which has received much political and media attention, and which also forms a central aspect of arguments around family breakdown, relates to patterns of divorce. In Britain, rates of divorce have increased steadily since the 1970s, culminating in the current disbanding of around 40% of marriages (Harper, 2003). Although, as Harper (2003) goes on to state, this is counterbalanced by the fact that those marriages that do not end in divorce will be longer because of increased life expectancy for both women and men. Accordingly, divorce, along with the greater number of children born outside marriage, has contributed significantly to changes in household and family composition. On one hand, the proportion of children living in lone parent families in Britain more than tripled between 1972 and 2006 to 24% (Social Trends, 2007). On the other hand is the rise in the number of step- and reconstituted families. Although precise figures are difficult to come by, there is little doubt that numbers have been growing as a consequence of divorce and remarriage (Allan and Crow, 2001).

Demographic changes, along with new family forms, are also impacting upon the position of older people within families. It is increasingly argued that families will be increasingly characterized by multi-generational bonds beyond the household, particularly between grandparents and grandchildren. Recent UK figures suggest that around a third of the population are grandparents and will remain so for an average of 25 years (Harper, 2005). Moreover, three-quarters of the UK population will at some stage attain grandparenthood (Dench and Ogg, 2002). With the expansion of the grandparent role across the span of an individual’s life, it is likely to occur while people are still engaged in numerous other social roles including work, associational and other family roles. In the United Kingdom, this context is reflected by current policy concerns over the role of grandparents (Dench and Ogg, 2002), particularly around childcare (Wheelock and Jones, 2002) and as a resource allowing lone mothers greater participation in the labour market (Harper et al, 2004).

Taken as a whole, these trends illustrate the point that fewer people live in a household characterized in terms of a “simple” nuclear family comprising a heterosexual couple and their two dependent children. In attempting to make sense of the increased diversity and fluidity in family relations, at least two key ideas from family sociology emerge – “individualization” (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002) and “negotiation” (Finch and Mason, 1995). According to the individualization thesis, individuals, over the latter half of the 20^th century have been gradually emancipated from traditional norms and, as a result, are able to exert a greater degree of control over their lives. This may be reflected in changing normative understandings about when is the “right” age to marry, about greater sexual freedom, challenging gender norms, and increased opportunities for educational, labour market and social mobility for women. Evidently there is much more flexibility in becoming a couple and whether people co-reside. Younger people are marrying less and are doing so at older ages. There also appear to be more choices around family and work, albeit choices which are gendered. People are far more able to choose the kinds of intimate relationships that are important to them, and are more likely to end them if they no longer accord with their personal preferences and objectives.

Coupled with the notion of “individualization” is the idea of “negotiation”. Relationships between men and women, parents and children, to a greater degree, involve negotiation. Families are not simply “givens” but need to be worked at, particularly when the issue of who is and who is not “family” is fluid and subject to change over time. In addition, relations between parents and (adult) children are increasingly characterized by democratization, mutual agreement, respect and reciprocity, and disclosure of information. Like individualization, the breakdown of ascribed social norms provides a degree of space within which to negotiate. This point is particularly evident when we consider the role of grandparents. As alluded to above, research evidence points to considerable solidarity between the generations within families, and this is reflected in high levels of support provided by grandparents to their children as parents. The current generation of grandparents is healthier and wealthier in their later life. This provides opportunities for them to develop meaningful and reciprocal relationships with their children and grandchildren, not least around education and learning. However, these bonds, whilst strong, still require negotiation. Most grandparents want to help out, but they do not necessarily want to provide child care on a full time basis. This is exemplified in recent debates around grandparents’ rights as well as grandparent support groups offering advice as to how establish ground rules with parents around childcare (see, for example, Hill, 2008). Grandparents can no longer be taken as “door mats”. Thus we see the emphasis upon continuing family responsibilities but in the context of negotiation and choices with other work and leisure roles.

Changing Minority Ethnic Families: Challenges and Trends

Are these changes in family life also impacting upon minority families? Is their influence more or less similar or different to that identified within majority families? Indeed, survey research has identified both similarities and differences in these patterns across ethnic groups. In the 2001 census, among all families, those headed by a person of a non-white ethnic background are much more likely than white families to have children living with them. Nearly 80% of Bangladeshi families had dependent children compared to just 40% of white families. Bangladeshi and Pakistani families tend to be larger than families of any other ethnic group. Mixed, Black Caribbean and White families with dependent children had the largest proportion of cohabiting couples, but cohabitation is less usual amongst Asian and Chinese populations. In turn, over 45% of Black Caribbean, Black African and mixed families were headed by a lone parent, compared with 25% of white families. According to the 4^th National Survey of Ethnic Minorities in Britain (Modood et al, 1997; Berthoud, 2005), only 39% of Caribbean adults under the age of 60 are in formal marriages compared to 60% of white adults under 60. Conversely, South Asians are characterized by higher rates of marriage with around three-quarters of Pakistani women in partnerships by the age of 25, compared with about two-thirds of Indian women and just about half of African-Asian and White women (Berthoud, 2005).

The most common method to help understand and explain ethnic differences in family formation has been to compare the degree to which minority ethnic families are following the path of “individualization” (as illustrated above by, amongst other things, rising patterns of cohabitation, divorce, less children, lone parenting) that is seen to be characterizing white majority families (see Beishon, 1995; Berthoud, 2001, 2005; Modood et al, 1997; Shaw, 2004).

Berthoud (2005), for example, posits a single scale running from “old fashioned values” to “modern individualism” as a way of interpreting ethnic variations with Pakistanis and Bangladeshis at the traditionalistic end and Caribbeans at the individualistic end and ahead of whites. Berthoud goes as far as to say that “the Caribbean family, in the traditional sense of a Caribbean man married to a Caribbean woman, may be dying out” (2005, p249). In contrast, South Asians remain strongly adhered to “old-fashioned values” with very few people cohabiting from an Asian ethnic background. This said, whilst South Asian adults are less likely to be living outside marriage, there is and has been a good number of Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis living alone temporarily due to migration processes which go unreported in surveys. For instance, men may be separated from their families by lengthy immigration procedures and in these cases women may become de facto lone parents for several years and, as a result, not in receipt of the support and benefits available to them.

Ethnic minority families also differ in relation to norms of responsibity towards older family members. As the American Sociologist Talcott Parsons noted some 50 years ago, in white families, an adult’s responsibilities towards partner and children are given precedence over existing obligations towards other kin. This tendency, however, is not so evident in minority ethnic families. Among some of Britain’s Asian population in particular, greater priority is given to parental ties in adulthood. There is much more sharing of the home across three generations, often in the form of common housekeeping. Multi-generational ties, both within and beyond households, have particular resonance amongst South Asian families, and to an extent Chinese families, in which couples continue to live with their parents after starting their own families. For example, around two-thirds of British resident Indian elders live with one of their adult children, compared with just 15% of white elders (Berthoud, 2005). However, young Asian families tend to live more often with the father’s rather than the mother’s family, meaning that, unlike the dominance of maternal grandparents commonly observed amongst whites, it is the widowed paternal grandmother who is most likely to live with the family.

Despite the differences between them, all ethnic groups, including South Asians, are viewed as moving towards the “modern individualism” end of the continuum, with lower rates of marriage and higher rates of cohabitation and single parenthood, albeit at different rates. Berrington (1994), over a decade ago, finds that whilst almost all Asians do get married, the second generation are marrying later than their parents, suggesting some assimilation in patterns towards those of the white population. Arranged marriage is a common form of marriage amongst South Asian groups. However, these patterns are also impacted upon by “western” notions of individual choice, with the individuals who are marrying being given more opportunities to influence partner selection than previously (Crow and Allan, 2001, p60).

It may be too simplistic however to view different ethnic groups in terms of their position on a continuity between modern individualism and traditionalism, but which are all shifting inevitably in the same direction. The result is a tendency to consider minority ethnic families in terms of their deviation from the “norm” or from the “standard white model” with Muslims as the most “culturally different” and resistant to change (see Smart and Shipman, 2004 for a critical discussion). In order to understand the significance of ethnic differences, a deeper understanding of the social and cultural context underlying these trends, of how distinctive cultural traditions and socio-economic pressures are shaping family patterns, is needed.

Shaw (2004) has identified how the family forms and relationships of Caribbeans and South Asians continue to reflect issues and concerns that relate to their respective regions of origin. For instances, Black Caribbean families in Britain reflect similarities with changing patterns of kinship in the Caribbean itself, with high rates of single motherhood, significant grandmother care, and a large proportion of children born outside marriage. Given the cultural continuity of these patterns between Britain and the Caribbean, it is difficult to see how they arise from the pressures of “modern individualism”. Of course, these trends have all appeared in debates surrounding the “problematic” nature of Black single motherhood. However, such a focus also overlooks the importance of ties beyond the household, both in the UK and trans-nationally. Reynolds (2006) has also criticized the stereotypical view of African Caribbean families as reflecting heightened individualism, indicated by weak kinship ties and a fragmented family structure, leading to youth crime, educational under-achievement and high youth unemployment. In fact, Caribbean families continue to demonstrate strong reciprocal ties and bonding both within local communities and across transnational networks (see also Gouldbourne, 2008). Trans-national kinship links continue to be significant for young people. In addition, family roles and relationships may be an important source of identity for young Caribbean men, who may be more likely to be unemployed and suffer ill-health. There is some evidence that family roles such as fatherhood gives these men a sense of purpose and value that is otherwise not available to them. Similarly, Shaw (2004) explores the differences between South Asian families, particular around marriage patterns, suggesting that attempts to group these populations together are unhelpful and overlook internal contradictions.

Certainties and Uncertainties in the Evolving Patterns of Change in Families

The conclusion of many scholars is that characterizations of current and future generations of minority families as moving towards “modern individualism”, and assimilating to the norms and values of the host society, may be misplaced. As has been noted, close trans-national links may actually be increasingly sustained by both the greater social mobility of young Caribbeans and South Asians in Britain, as well as by further developments in communication technology.

If these trends around the globalising of family relationships continue, then one would expect individuals and families to be less rooted around local place and in relation to the communities in which we were born or grew up. They will involve the maintenance of ties across greater distances between Britain, Europe and the World. But there are contradictory trends and we should be careful not to over-generalize about the impact of globalization. There has also been a parallel rise in the importance of the local, the increase in ethnic group solidarity, and different forms of project identity. This will emphasize active family and community togetherness, not free floating individualism. In this sense, physical contact may become even more, rather than less, salient in the form of family gatherings, celebrations and the passing on of traditions and rituals. The global fascination with genealogy and family trees may stem from the need for self-understanding and belonging in a globalizing world where identities can become easily blurred and where choices seem overwhelming.

It would also be erroneous to view the changes referred to above, as often happens in debates about the family, as evidence of instability or as a decline in the importance of family. That family responsibilities based on ascribed traditional norms of responsibility can no longer be assumed is only one side of the story. All the research evidence shows the considerable hard work, time and effort that people put into maintaining their connections to other family members across boundaries and differences and who may live in other countries. Rather than changes driving people apart, making the family more fragile and people more self-focused, we see people continuing to invest considerable energy and value into their personal relationships. As the boundaries of family life become more complicated, we see a greater emphasis upon the communication and “display” (Finch, 2007) of familyness, as the means by which families are established. We also see more attempts to seek out family histories through genealogical software and historical societies, and an interest in resemblances and heritability (Mason, 2008).

All this said, previous misplaced claims about how the family will look today, such as those around family breakdown and fragmentation also serve as warnings against the pitfalls of over-generalisation and unwarranted extrapolation of current trends into the future. Inevitably, visions of possible futures will draw selectively from the range of evidence available. Any predictions around the particular direction that families will take are questionable to the extent that they overlook the scope for diversity. Furthermore, the degree to which current trends represent sharp qualitative breaks with the past is highly questionable. In focusing primarily upon change, we risk overlooking significant consistencies and continuities that would be equally important in understanding how families in the future will unfold. For example, there remains a degree of uniformity in families because of the persistence of structural factors, such as the labour market. There is also little change in gender relations in the household, despite the growth of married women’s paid work. This relates to normative constraints, but also to other issues such as labour market differentials between men and women, as well as gendered assumptions implicit within welfare policies (eg parental leave), which continue to reinforce rational decision making between couples regarding who does what.

The Role of Science and Communication Technology in Shaping Contemporary and Future Family Relations

Developments in communication networks and information technology are already shaping family relations, not least amongst minoritised families dispersed by international migration. The rising availability (and affordability) of air travel, telecommunications and other new digital forms of communication are further encouraging the development of trans-national ties on a global scale. This is occurring, however, not just amongst those with a history of migration, but among a wider range of families whose children, siblings, parents and/or grandparents are living and working for varying amounts of time abroad.

In some families, we will see the internet and other new and advanced telecommunication systems acting as the principal means by which family members and friends establish frequent and regular contact. Recent developments such as SKYPE and VONAGE may be responding to, as well as normalizing, these demands. SKYPE claims to have 309 million registered members worldwide and 12 million users at peak times (BBC News, 2005). Like SMS messaging previously, SKYPE is becoming part of the everyday terminology of family and friends. Again, the availability and affordability of this software is key. Increasingly these facilities will be used by both children and parents to contact each other. However, while we know that these will form an increasingly important role in how family members communicate, there remain uncertainties as to the extent of this change, how it will affect the nature of relations and the meanings people ascribe to family life. There are at least three areas where the effects of technology are already evident and which have particular salience for the future:

Resolving work and family conflict?

One tangible impact of technology on family life is the shift in the work-home relationship. For example, as a result of digital forms of communication people are increasingly able to take their work home, and to combine working from both office and home to suit their family and caring obligations. This has become a particular trend within dual earner families. Conversely this may lead to a colonization of family space and time by work space and time, for example, in “mum is working” times or working during the post-bedtime shift. At certain moments, the space between working and not working becomes blurred, for example, internet searching, and reading newspapers and magazines. Work and family domains are also blurred by the expectation, generated by these technologies that individuals are, and should, be available all the time. Thus, there remain several unanswered questions around how these developments in flexible working conditions will impact upon family life. On one hand, they may provide people with choices in order to resolve work and family conflicts, allowing more and more people work from home and in locations that allow them to combine responsibilities. On the other hand, they may encourage employers to put even more pressure on workers to work further away and spend more time away from home. These developments will undoubtedly impact upon domestic gender divisions and decision making processes within the family. Time pressures can lead to stress for working parents and how people negotiate work and family roles becomes an increasingly important issue.

“Intimacy at a distance”?

There will also be transformations in the relationship between emotional closeness and physical contact. Family members scattered across continents will view themselves as emotionally close because they are making the effort to stay in touch despite their considerable spatial barriers. In turn, the possibility of video calls, which already account for a quarter of all traffic on SKYPE, could change the way in which family members perceive and understand intimacy and the link between physical contact and emotional closeness. It is interesting to note that people who use these facilities regularly will use terms and phrases like ‘intimate’, ‘close’, ‘just like being in the same room’ to describe these forms of communication. What role do they play in how people form relationships? Do they produce necessarily more fragile relationships? Will they enable people to sustain relationships that would otherwise break down and end? Families are creating a ‘networked’ sense of connectedness, for example, by making and sending videotapes and emailing distant relatives, family histories are recorded and distributed across the globe. These are already occurring, but we see them happening on a much grander scale, leading to more fundamental shifts in what being intimate and being close means.

Parenting and children: More or less control?

The rise of more democratic forms of parent-child relationships means that children are taking an even greater interest in, and having an input in decision making. New forms of digital communication will represent a key medium through which these decisions are made. For example, parents may already be encouraging the purchase and use of mobile phones by their children at a young age to the extent that they allow them greater control and monitoring of the children’s activities and whereabouts. They may allow parents to act as “virtual chaperones”, monitoring activity and safety within an increasingly “risky” environment. On one hand this implies more equal partnerships. On the other, the control and monitoring of children’s behaviours may be extended, beyond the physical, at the virtual level. How will potential technological developments by Google around live satellite pictures at street level shape this? How are new forms of communication shaping the democratic openness of how monitoring and supervision works in families?

Education, Ethnicity, Changing Families and Intergenerational learning

As outlined above, demographic changes as well as changing family forms, such as dual income and lone parent families, place a greater emphasis upon the intergenerational relationship between children and their grandparents. The increasing amounts of time children spend with their grandparents raises direct questions about education and its relationship to intergenerational learning that takes place within families as well as in schools (see also Gregory et al, 2007; Kenner et al, 2007). The role of grandparents can often alleviate the time pressures faced by working parents, and in certain situations may substitute parents’ time investments in promoting children’s education. While intergenerational transfers of time, care and money tend to work downward – from grandparents to grandchildren – the nature of intergenerational learning is a reciprocal one. There has been anecdotal evidence for some time regarding how children teach their grandparents to use computers, internet and other technological developments.

We know that the family provides opportunities for frequent interaction between young and old, and this has become an important aspect within debates about age segmentation and segregation. A key area to consider is the role of schools in fostering this. Evidence from intergenerational programmes also suggests that schools need to be more aware of the opportunities available for mutual learning between children and older people, and the wider societal benefits this provides. Changing attitudes towards older people, including grandparents, need to be recognized within educational and learning paradigms – not as conveyors of out-dated traditional forms of knowledge but as agents with skills and knowledge that compliment children’s formal education.

Intergenerational learning also has particular implications for minority ethnic families and citizenship. Previous conventional understandings of citizenship had assumed that acculturation of minorities to the host society values was an inevitable process. The orientations of 2^nd and 3^rd generation migrants would be firmly orientated to the host society as opposed to the country of origin. Most of the UK research evidence has shown this to not be the case. The mutual learning that occurs between grandchildren and grandparents can also act to promote citizenship amongst older people. The current government has initiated a number of policies aimed at citizenship education and the better integration of new citizens to the UK.

Schools represent the key domain through which the state is able to actively foster national values to its citizenry. Yet as patterns of migration change (for example, people migrating during middle and later life), citizenship education needs to be broadened in order to form part of lifelong learning. To what extent will previous migrants, such as those who came during the 1950s and 1960s, act as role models for more recent migrants of a similar age group? The adaptation of new migrants also requires a much broader notion of citizenship education – not simply with regard to civic values, democracy and Britishness – but also with less abstract forms of knowledge which impact directly upon their mobility, eg qualifications, labour market issues, entitlements and service provision, and issues to do with intercultural communication.

Globalization has extended and intensified the flows of migration between societies and this has been met with concerns over the integration and needs of the new and diverse migrants. A good deal of their societal adaptation can be learned from previous and existing migrants, thus there need to be spaces for mutual learning within civil society, for example, through community and adult education centres.

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This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.