This paper describes the delivery of action learning sets to students on the peer educator course provided by the Dementia Studies Department at University of Bradford. Our understanding of action learning sets is laid out together with our rationale for their use on this course. Feedback is presented that described a conflicted, even confused experience for many of those involved. This paper is the outcome of the organising teams' effort to make sense of, and learn from, this feedback in order to inform our future practice. We conclude that, amongst the many issues, most key was that the students had been subscripted into an action learning process for which voluntary commitment is more usually the norm. (Contains 1 table.)