Referencing the parent now only works for chaining class

You used to be able to concatenate parent and child selectors. The following is now producing a selector with a space

.content-module-navigation{
    &-one-col {
        background-color:red;
    }
}

Produces

.content-module-navigation -one-col { background: red; }

It used to produce

.content-module-navigation-one-col { background: red; }

It works fine when it is a class name

.content-module-navigation{
    &.one-col {
        background-color:red;
    }
}

The above produces

.content-module-navigation.one-col { background: red; }

This is no good for IE6 which can't chain classes. Does anyone know how to fix this? I think it happened after upgrading to 3.2.288.20623

Thanks for any help

I read through the SASS change log and it seems this has been deprecated, but I could understand the reason.

Deprecate parent selectors followed immediately by identifiers (e.g. &foo). This should never have worked, since it violates the rule of & only being usable where an element selector would.

So removed because it should never have worked?! And why does it still work but adds a space?

Does anyone know a good alternative?

Thanks