I was up at the school again yesterday, for another session. Four people turned up – I don’t know what the charity’s expectations are, but that doesn’t seem like many to me. Our village has about 5,000 inhabitants.

As I see it, possible reasons for this are:

(i) that there is no interest in the sbject matter.

Maybe. People do become set in their ways as they get older. Maybe once you reach a certain age, such-and-such a problem doesn’t seem wirth the effort? But at the same time, some people have travelled quite some distance – from our local city (Salisbury) and beyond. So to come that far, some people must want to pick these skills up.

(ii) that our village lies in the back of beyoud

This is obviously possible, since we do! A few people on the course have actually come looking for it, so maybe there just aren’t enough people locally to generate the numbers for the course?

(iii) location

We’re in a school which has quite an impressive computer room. There are lots of PCs there, all running Windows 10. I can totally understand why you’d want such an environment to prepare students for the business world, but possibly our target audience has different needs? Unfortunately, I missed the first session, but I did suggest that it should cover things even more basic than computers, such as plugging a router into a phone socket, and getting an internet connection in the first place. If you dropped someone in their home environment, gave them a computer, and told them off you go, there is still some more knowledge required. But I’ve also heard a couple of people say that their internet (which they obviously have already) was set up by their children. so I have no idea whether these people would want to find out about how the connection works, or whether the fact that it just exists is enogh for them.

(iv) changes in the session times

we (the volunteers) ourselves were a little confused, because whilst most of the sessions were on a Wednesday, there were a couple of sessions on a Thursday. I can’t imagine that this is at all fatal, and certainly a phone call to the Age UK office would clarify things, but by the same token, the arrangements were more complicated than they could have been.

(v) rubbish tuition!

That the students are taking the lead role as tutors here, and I think they were brilliant. So if there was a problem with the tuition, I misread the situation.