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Community men's sheds and the international movement associated with them provide an excellent example of one of many possible neat fits between men's learning and wellbeing, paradoxically and almost counter-intuitively without formalising or foregrounding either. The intention of our paper is to explore how men's sheds in community settings might point towards a way of radically changing thinking about men's informal learning, particularly for the significant proportion of older men not in paid work. What underpins this thinking is research into returns to adult education from nations such as Australia and Canada that while the least educated are least likely to participate, when they do participate they are most likely to benefit, and that training alone represents an inefficient investment policy for the less skilled. Our paper is also consistent with Coombs and Ahmed's (1974, p.8) contention that informal education is 'the lifelong process by which every individual acquires and accumulates knowledge, skills, attitudes and insights from daily exposure to the environment - at home, at work, at play.' Indeed, important aspects of all three are embedded within a community men's shed setting. While sheds have been particularly attractive to older men excluded in one or more dimensions (economic, social, spatial and institutional), it is important to acknowledge that men's sheds can and do accommodate men of all ages, and that some sheds specialize in young people. It is also important in a paper to a conference about gendered adult learning to acknowledge and explore what an important but often subtle roles women have played in shed development.

Men's sheds demonstrate how a community-based, grassroots international movement embedding both learning and wellbeing can be advanced by collective action by men themselves in community setting. The critical condition is that men are not treated as customers, patients, students or clients from negative, deficit or ageist models. While the shed movement started slowly and from small beginnings in parts of Australia, its very recent and rapid spread across and well beyond Australia to New Zealand, Ireland, and England is evidence of what can and does happen when men exercise agency, and when governments listen to and work with men rather than problematise or patronise. On one hand, our paper suggests that while sheds are conservative in that they reinforce and celebrate some traditional ways of being a man and doing things together, 'shoulder to shoulder'. On the other hand, men's sheds are radical in that they are based on models of community involvement that are democratic and inclusive, which eschew negative and hegemonic masculinities, are respectful of women, encouraging of salutogenic (health promoting) behaviour and of learner autonomy. This final condition is consistent with meta-analyses into research across all forms learning (Black, McCormick, James and Pedder, 2006) that an 'emphasis should be placed on practices, in both individual and collaborative contexts that seem to have the potential to promote ... autonomy in learning. This would seem to be the most secure foundation for lifelong learning.'

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[The] Commonwealth of Learning's Lifelong Learning for Farmers [L3F] is a partnership program designed to bring together farmers, learning institutions, banks and information and communication technology providers to facilitate learning for development in the rural areas. The program is in response to the critical need for information resulting from agricultural research and development which often fail to reach the target farmers in rural areas in the developing world where it is most needed. The program empowered the vulnerable farmers and their families to gain knowledge and skill development, increase their productivity, food security and liberate agricultural communities from socio-economic constraints. Lifelong Learning for Farmers has resulted in improvement of quality of their produce and equally improved their incomes leading to significant improvement in livelihoods of the rural poor and hence reduces poverty.

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This paper discusses proposed research on the wellbeing of Australian lawyers in the workplace. It examines what is known about workplace satisfaction for lawyers in Australia, compared with the worrying findings about the legal profession in the United States. The paper examines the likely causes of dissatisfaction including how universities traditionally teach law and what students are not told about legal practice. The authors discuss the need to investigate the wellbeing and satisfaction levels among newly admitted lawyers, and to consider ways to teach law that could help lawyers not only make wise career choices but develop strategies to cope better with stressors in their workplace. Clinical legal education could help students develop professionally as well as personally in order to improve their chances of having a happy and productive life at work.

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The aim of this project was to describe how Indigenous health students and staff have experienced and responded to racism, in order to identify strategies that promote resilience and to explore how this knowledge can be translated into an organisational response in health service and tertiary education settings. Resilience training is the under-explored flip-side of current cross-cultural training and along with improved institutional responses has the potential to increase the sense of well-being of Indigenous staff and students and their participation in the health professions. Bulletproofing Indigenous health students and staff, offers benefits while racism persists.

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The aim of the paper is to propose a methodology for designing a composite indicator of job quality, which considers objective characteristics of the job (e.g. salary, level of autonomy, working hour arrangements) for the construction of the dimensions and a subjective evaluation of the same attributes for the construction of weights. The composite indicator of job quality is based on three dimensions (economic, professional, work-life balance) which are leveraged by the firms in designing the workers' activities. In order to test and validate the indicator, the job quality of a sample of recent Italian graduates has been measured. Some applications of the indicator (for the individuals, the firms, and the educational system) are proposed.

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Young people from refugee backgrounds often have disrupted education experiences that intersect with other forms of disadvantage, resulting in difficulties making life transitions (Beadle, 2014; Nunn et al., 2014). While specialised, learner-level support can be effective in assisting young refugees to maintain engagement (Lamb et al., 2018), the persistence of attainment issues are cause for a reassessment of the way outcomes are framed and programs are designed. This paper examines the participation of young people from refugee backgrounds in Australian education, focusing on the example of an educational reengagement program delivered in Melbourne, Victoria. Program participants work with specialist Pathways Counsellors to articulate their aspirations and engage in a range of activities that complement educational reengagement. Our analysis demonstrates the importance of intensive planning and maintaining service engagement, combined with activities that build young people's self-confidence, goal orientation and facilitate social interaction. We argue that appreciation of the ‘mess, non-linearity and lack of stability’ in young people’s lived experiences (Woodman, 2020) can reveal incremental, attainable outcomes for refugees who face complex educational disadvantages. As cyclical and sporadic public funding arrangements for social services make this flexibility difficult to achieve, we also suggest a focus at the provider level on combining multiple sources of community support and intervention.

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In the Swiss dual initial vocational education and training (IVET) system, quality plays an important role. Among the quality characteristics are perceived role stress, which can differ depending on school and professional apprentices' experiences. The aim of this contribution is to highlight different dual apprentices' profiles based on their perceptions of role stress as a characteristic of their IVET's quality. Using latent profile analysis, we uncovered four apprentices' profiles reflecting different perceptions of role stress. We examined the profiles in terms of their sociodemographic composition, perceived satisfaction, and professional and school engagement. The results show that the profile in which apprentices report the lowest role stress is the one with the highest average levels of satisfaction and professional engagement. This contribution underlines the central aspect of role stress perceived by apprentices and informs about the importance of considering it in the quality of IVET.

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This paper provides an overview of a research area which has generated limited research or impact on public policy: men and their educational, labour market and well-being issues and trends in New Zealand. Males have had lower levels of educational achievements than women across primary, intermediate and secondary schools and this has become a long-term embedded pattern. This has subsequently influenced tertiary education where the current dearth of domestic male students has become noticeable in several fields (including some concerning ethnicity patterns).

The labour market trends have recorded two rather contradictory patterns: on one hand, some traditional occupational and industry gender patterns have been remarkably slow to change while other gender patterns - particularly in service and professional occupations - have recorded a dramatic transformation in recent decades. Finally, male well-being and particular well-being amongst younger males need to become a public policy concern with their high rates of suicide, incarceration and work-related deaths and sickness.

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Whereas most studies on participation in government training focus on the effects on reemployment and wages, this paper takes a different approach. Based on the findings of previous studies which show that subjective well being is important for re-employment of the unemployed, this paper investigates the effect of participation in government training on subjective well being. [The author] extends Jahoda's (1982) theory on the needs fulfilled by employment and Fryer's (1986) theory on the relationship between subjective well being and labour market status. [The paper] uses the first 13 waves of the British Household Panel Survey. [The author] finds that both current and previous participation in government training have a positive effect on subjective well being, although the effect of previous participation decreases over time.

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This paper outlines the scale of the adult literacy and numeracy issue in New Zealand and describes a policy intervention designed to upskill employees in workplaces to help resolve the issue for them. This is the Workplace Literacy and Numeracy (WLN) Fund which enables around 7000 employees a year to complete a 25 to 80-hour learning programme, usually in their workplace and in work time. The paper also describes what happens in workplaces while programmes are underway and the short-term wellbeing, social, and economic outcomes that occur for individual employees. In this context, literacy and numeracy relates to the way in which adults use skills that involve reading, writing, speaking, listening, and mathematics in everyday life. It also includes digital skills in relation to how adults engage and interact with Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Overall these skills are those that individuals need for learning, life, and work in the 21st Century.

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