Section: Work and Equal Opportunities

Over the past few years; there has been a strong focus at both the European and national levels to (re)engage educationally disadvantaged people in adult education with the aim of closing the gap in participation rates between lowly and highly qualified people.

In recent years, there has been a lot of literature produced on the engagement of educationally disadvantaged people in further education and training. Very often this literature has had a strong focus on trainings and presents good practice examples of training content or curricula. Also within this project, in.education, a report on three tested training courses for educationally disadvantaged people was produced (Manahl, C., Tschank, J. 2016).

However, these good practice examples do not provide a lot of insight into the necessary prerequisites at an organisational level to develop training that reflects the needs of this target group, keeps them engaged and enables them to complete it successfully. What does the successful engagement of disadvantage learners imply for the composition and qualifications of staff, for public relations, support services, co-operations or partnerships and for the self-perception of an organisation or for the way an organisation is perceived by others? When it comes to these questions, existing literature provides guidelines and recommendations while examples from actual practice are scarce.

This report aims at answering these questions by giving some insight into the learning experiences at the organisational level of adult education providers which offer trainings for educationally disadvantaged people.

This report was produced within the Erasmus+ project in.education and is based on a literature review as well as several interviews with managerial staff of adult education providers in Austria, Ireland, and the United Kingdom.

Project background

In.education aims at developing strategies to increase the participation of educationally disadvantaged persons, especially those with basic educational needs, in adult education. To reduce possible barriers to education for educationally disadvantaged persons, the project focusses on developing strategies at three levels: system, individual and organisational levels. 

In its first phase, the project worked on the systemic level by seeking to activate and inform individuals in the social environment of educationally disadvantaged people, so that they could act as intermediaries informing the target group about existing educational opportunities and motivating them to take part. The second phase of the project focussed on the individual level. It did this by developing and delivering targeted training courses in Austria, Ireland and the United Kingdom that should have been the starting point for participants to (re)engage with learning.

The third phase of the project, on which this paper is based, focuses on the organisational level. In this project phase, training programmes for adult education providers will be developed and implemented by the practice project partners. This report serves as background information for these trainings.

Authors: Manahl, C., Tschank, J.

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Related Articles:

• Project: inclusion & education
• Publication: (Re)engagement of disadvantaged learners with education through validating informally or non-formally acquired competences
• Publication: New Strategies to engage educationally disadvantaged people in adult education activities: An evaluation report