Schools for Silver Surfers: A Silver Surfers' Day initiative by Digital Unite and ERoSH – you can join in now!

Digital Unite (DU) worked with ERoSH in the spring of 2009 to trial a new initiative to help sheltered scheme managers to link up with local schools. This is so that schools and sheltered schemes can find a way to deliver IT taster events to help older people have a good first-taste of being on the Internet.

The activity coincided with Silver Surfers' Day (SSD) (15 May 2009) and worked well. A total of 66 schools got involved and 53 housing providers, so there's a lot of lively interest there! (Not all of these housing providers linked with schools, and vice versa: it would be good if those links could happen in volume next year.)

If you want to be part of all this, you can't do better than start planning now for next year's Silver Surfers' Day. Helping older people to understand how computers and being active online is a wonderfully rewarding task. Next year's Silver Surfers' Day is May 21st, 2010. There's a flyer (see Link 1 below) and you can get more information from Gill Adams. Resources and advice are free (and available for free use throughout the year) from www.silversurfers.digitalunite.com.

Interested? Find a local specialist school to partner with. Fill in as much of the online form as you can and wait patiently(!) until the information loads - see Link 2 below. Schools that aren't specialist schools may well also be interested in linking up. Google for 'Directgov' or 'Ofsted' for schools in the locality and then write to the head teacher or ring the school and ask to speak to the person who has responsibility for community engagement.

More information: Some sheltered scheme managers already deliver SSD events annually to their residents but not usually in conjunction with schools. This initiative is to widen knowledge about this possibility, and for us all to learn how best to make it easier to plan and deliver.

The logic is that the resources of the school - teachers, pupils, equipment - can be made available to older people. The young people can gain experience of being tutors, with a little training and management by their teachers. In practice, this might mean older people visiting their local school for tutoring, or it might mean younger people coming into communal lounges to help answer questions using a computer in the public lounge. There is no 'set' way for this to happen - but Digital Unite has examples of both ways, notably at Broadgreen School in Liverpool; Chesham High School in Buckinghamshire and Ampney Crucis Primary in Gloucestershire (see a BBC film of the school children and grandparents at work - see Link 3 below.

Why should sheltered housing get involved with schools?
There are the obvious benefits to older people of getting online (makes life easier and cheaper for them). But linking up with schools to do this helps housing to fulfil certain statutory obligations. For example, see these Supplementary Standards of the Quality Assessment Framework as applied to sheltered schemes:

S1.1 Informing service-users
S1.2 Consulting and involving service-users
S1.3 Empowerment and supporting independence
S1.4 Participation in the wider community
S3.2 Choice, sensitivity and responsiveness and
S4.1 Continuous improvement.

For information about everything contained in this article, visit www.silversurfers.digitalunite.com