ABSTRACT
This chapter explores why older learners are often perceived as a challenge to the habitus of university life and how assessment might present barriers and opportunities to progression and attainment. The needs of older learners are not sui generis, but their disregard reflects the inadequacies of a higher education sector that has failed to modernize. The chapter highlights how lifelong learning is one of the keys to drive the global economy through competitive advantage and improving social cohesion. Adult learning and assessment have the potential to create space for contextualized and emancipatory learning, and used as a powerful tool to challenge inequality and empower not only the learners but their families and communities too. The link between educational participation, previous participation and class made by the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE) in its annual participations surveys the argument that participation in education in later life can lead to well-being is only recently being explored.
