Section: Work and Equal Opportunities

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

Data from recent studies show, that persons with low levels of education are less likely to have access to information on learning possibilities compared to people with higher educational levels. Therefore, when trying to increase the participation of educational disadvantaged people in education and training, a key question that needs to be tackled, is how this target group can be reached.

As a result of this, the first phase of the project in.education focussed on the systemic level. It did this by developing a model to reach educationally disadvantaged people through new multipliers. In this context, “new multipliers” are understood to be persons from the social environment of educationally disadvantaged people e.g. parents, family, non-family caregivers, works council member or social workers.

In this phase of the project, workshops in Austria, the United Kingdom and Ireland were organised to sensitise potential new multipliers by establishing these persons as a link between adult education institutions and the educationally disadvantaged. 

This paper presents and analyses:

• The new multipliers that were identified in the 3 partner countries (Austria, the United Kingdom and Ireland);
• How they were reached; and 
• Whether workshops are an appropriate method to prepare the participants for their new role as multipliers for the educationally disadvantaged.

Authors: Manahl, C., Tschank, J.

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Tags: lifelong learning, social inclusion