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 have difficulties in accessing education due of for example lack of educational qualifications. 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 will focus on the development of strategies to increase the enrolment of educationally disadvantaged people especially those with basic education needs into relevant educational programs. It will therefore develop 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 will be developed that will 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 will be developed. From this experience, in.education will develop an application oriented curriculum (output: Outreach concept). 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 will be 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 (Output: validation concept for application of educationally disadvantaged people). 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 will be extracted. From these defined implementation competences, training will be designed in which educational managers and trainers can participate (Output: training curriculum for employees in adult education based on the conditions for successful participation in education of educationally disadvantaged people). As a consequence, three curricula will be developed and tested with the participants. The products will be user-oriented, prepared to be self-explanatory and include information on the process, content, methods used and allow a glance into the used materials.
The aim of in.education was to increase the educational participation of people with a disadvantaged educational background through developing and testing three different strategies. Three curricula were developed and tested with the participants. “IO 1 – The sensibilisation and education offer for persons close to educationally disadvantaged people”: The socioeconomic environment has an influence on the educational pathways of individuals, including on whether educationally disadvantaged people can be reached at all through traditional educational methods. An innovative outreach concept was therefore developed as part of the project. Members of exemplary social environments of the target group were identified and then participated in awareness raising and education offers. These were intended to activate the participants as new multipliers. They should then inform educationally disadvantaged people from their social environments about educational offers and formats and motivate them to participate. Addressed as new multipliers were individuals with a migration background, workers’ councils, volunteers in organisations or churches or councillors of e.g. long-term unemployed people with no specific knowledge of educational disadvantages. As implementing modes, workshops were tested in different designs or modern forms such as webinars. The experiences and results were summarised in a manual: "Workshops for New Multipliers. Experimental and Experimental Investigations in Europe". The entire outreach process was evaluated and published: "New Strategies to Involve Educationally Disadvantaged People in Adult Education Activities". “IO 2- Curriculum for the collection and validation of informally acquired educational competencies”: In this part of the project, the team focused on the individual level. It developed educational offers for educationally disadvantaged people with basic education problems. In these offers, the collection, description and validation of informally acquired competences was strictly implemented. Through this genuine resource-oriented approach, it was demonstrated that consistent empowerment directly causes educational participation. Approximately 70% of the participants in the educational offers developed in the project subsequently attended other educational programmes, reaching from the completion of compulsory education to the attendance of language or basic training courses to labour market-related educational programmes. Participants were: Single mothers of different ethnic origins and ages, physically and mentally disabled persons, individuals with no specific language skills in the education language of the respective country, young adults from structurally weak emigration regions largely without perspectives, etc. 44% of all participants were motivated to participate in these programmes through the sensibilised new multipliers of IO 1. Experiences and results were published in Manual 2: "New Strategies to Involve Educationally Disadvantaged People in Adult Education Activities". The evaluation was made available in the publication: "(Re)engagement of disadvantaged learners with education through validating informally or non-formally acquired competences". “IO 3- Trainings for adult education providers to increase their implementation skills as regards less educated people”: The core questions of the intellectual part of this project part was: Which competencies must an organisation develop in order to ensure the successful participation and quality of results for educationally disadvantaged people? Starting from the conditions of the implementation of the programmes in IO 1 and IO 2 and the results of a project-based background study (interviews with education managers in the UK, Ireland and Austria), trainings for employees of adult education institutions were developed and implemented. The content ranged from questions regarding the selection and inclusion processes, diversity-led interactions in the classroom, validation of competencies, recognition of deficits to aspects such as group composition and to questions of educating education staff. Country models, recommendations and conclusions are available in manual 3: "Training for providers of adult education to increase their competence in the performance of offers, in which educationally disadvantaged people participate. Results and reflections". The background study with the title "Necessary prerequisites at the organisational level for (re) engaging disadvantaged learners in education." was also published. The products contain information on the process, the content and the methodology. Recommendations were formulated and conclusions drawn and they provide insights into the accompanying scientific process. They are available for download on the websites of the partners, e.g. on www.isop.at/in.education.