in.education

Work and Equal Opportunities

inclusion & education

Development of strategies to increase the enrolment of educationally disadvantaged people, especially those with basic education needs, into relevant educational programs

Existing data as well as practical experiences show that educational programs - including those that specifically address educationally disadvantaged people - are not utilised enough by "all potential" target groups and sufficient diversification of participants groups is achieved only rarely. The reasons for this phenomenon are many and varied. They arise as a result of mixed organisational patterns, educational behaviour of individuals and are caused by structural, procedural and individual initial conditions, which have a common relevance to adult education. The often-mentioned structural change facing Europe in general and specifically each Member State, which particularly refers to its migration and diverse society, can only be dealt with by providing equal and suitable conditions for accessing educational opportunities to people, who because of their personal situation, for example due to lack of educational qualifications, have difficulties in accessing education . The responsibility of the provision of these fair and adequate conditions for the participation in education should also be borne by adult education providers. They must be empowered to develop solutions to reduce barriers and offer educational programs that address diversity to especially those people who may not yet have found a satisfactory entry route into education or for those who have “finished” with education; so that they can reopen the education window for them.
In.education focuses on the development of strategies to increase the enrolment of educationally disadvantaged people especially those with basic education needs into relevant educational programs. The project therefore develops strategies to reduce possible barriers by focussing on system, individual and institutional related levels.

Systemic level: Following the hypothesis that people are deeply influenced by their socio-economic environment, methods and strategies are developed that proactively raise awareness and motivate enrolment in education. This will result in the activation and expansion of multipliers. Besides the identification of relevant target groups, application-oriented settings (pilot workshops) targeted towards stakeholder groups are developed. From this experience, in.education develops an application oriented curriculum.
These activities are evaluated in this report.

The evaluation report on this project phase is available here.
A detailed descritption of the activities of this project phase is available here.
A short summary of the main lessons learned and recommendations of this project phase is available here.

Individual level: The hypothesis that that the enrolment rate in education increases when informally acquired educational qualifications are collected, described and recognised, leading to the admission of those concerned into the education system, emerges from a cycle of transnational cooperation in the collection and validation of informally gained educational competences of educationally disadvantaged people with basic education deficits. This is implemented by the provision of formal compulsory education measures in each partner country in order to validate whether shorter possibilities of accomplishment of compulsory education for adults can be yielded from this cooperation.

The evaluation report on this project phase is available here.
A detailed descritption of the activities of this project phase is available here.

Organisational level: Starting from the presumption that adult education institutions have not yet adjusted sufficiently to the challenges generated from a diverse society and based on the implementation experience of in.education specifically derived from the learning outcomes and the competence-based training events in the systemic and individual levels, implementation competences that organisations dealing with educationally disadvantaged individuals must have in order to increase enrolment and guarantee the quality of results for this groups of persons is extracted. From these defined implementation competences, training are designed in which educational managers and trainers can participate.

The report of the study conducted by ZSI in this project phase is available here.

As a consequence, three curricula for three target groups (new multipliers, educational disadvantaged people, and educational managers and trainers) are developed and tested. The products are user-oriented, prepared to be self-explanatory and include information on the process, content, methods used and allow a glance into the used materials.

ZSI is mainly responsible for the scientific accompaniment and evaluation of the different elements of the project.

Team: