This project is a direct result of our current KA1 project 'Extending the literacy houses approach' and focuses on the further development and embedding of the Literacy houses concept as implemented in the Dutch region West-Brabant. A Literacy house is a place for everyone who wants to work on (the improvement of) his or her language skills. Daily practice shows that the structural embedding of the Literacy houses concept requires an extension of the concept to include not only language skills but all essential skills. Essential skills are the skills needed for life, learning and work. They provide the foundation for learning all other skills and enable people to evolve and adapt to change. Our main question is: 'How can we extend our current Literacy houses concept to include all essential skills and transform it into a centre of development?' We will focus on participation in its broadest sense. In doing so, we have selected two main themes which are relatively new to the Netherlands. Creation Besides the more classical methods for the transfer of knowledge, we intend to research other - more creative - methods of acquiring language and essential skills or methods that lead to a better embedding of lessons learned. Employment Over 50% of the people in the Netherlands with low essential skills is employed. Consequently, employers are a very important partner in the improvement of essential skills. In practice, however, they are hardly ever involved in our current Literacy houses concept. Secondly, Literacy houses can play an important role in helping people with low essential skills find a job. Within this project, we intend to research which approaches, styles and methods are possible. The following partners will take part in the project: Cubiss Brabant, Public Library Breda, ROC West-Brabant, Stichting Lezen & Schrijven, Bergen Offentlige Bibliotek, Ulmer Volkshochschule, Learning and Work Institute and SPK vzw. They will all bring their specific knowledge, expertise and experiences related to the abovementioned themes to the project. All partners have also submitted their own learning questions and desired outcome of the project in order to further develop their own approach. We want to make sure that everyone can successfully participate in our society. In order to be able to do so, they need to be equipped with certain essential skills. The proposed activities are directly related to the main challenge of the consortium in West-Brabant to extend its current Literacy houses concept so that it can become the centre of development that our society so desperately needs (a centre of life long learning). The project will be kicked off during an international conference in September 2017, during which we will share the results and experiences of our KA1 project 'Extending the Literacy houses approach'. The day prior to the conference, we will plan a transnational project meeting with all new project partners to make further arrangements relating to our KA2 project. The results of our KA2 project will be presented to a wide audience during an international conference, which will probably take place in June 2019. Again, we will plan a transnational project meeting with all project partners on the day prior to the conference in order to evaluate the project and determine possible follow-up activities. All Dutch project partners will make study trips to the project partners in Norway, Germany, Wales and Belgium. During these study trips, we want to learn from their specific knowledge, expertise and experience. We will process our findings in a case study concerning creation, a case study concerning employment and a toolkit related to Essential skills houses. The obtained insights will be translated to fit the specific situation in West-Brabant; how can they successfully be incorporated in our current approach? These intellectual outputs will be shared both nationally and internationally, e.g. through the existing networks and communication channels of all project partners as well as networks such as the Erasmus+ Project Results Platform and EPALE (online platform for adult education in Europe). We believe that all stakeholders that operate in the field of essential skills will be able to benefit from the insights we will acquire during this project. Our project strongly focuses on the long-term sustainability of our current Literacy houses concept. Cubiss Brabant (and her counterparts in the other Dutch provinces), the Royal Dutch Library and Stichting Lezen & Schrijven are all solid organisations with long-term funding who together have a nationwide coverage. They will all incorporate the insights and results obtained within this project in their structures, approaches and instruments. This also applies to all other partners within this project.
This KA2 project 'Paving the way for essential skills houses' was a direct result of our KA1 project 'Extending the literacy houses approach' and focused on the further development and embedding of the currently used Literacy houses concept. A Literacy house is a place for everyone who wants to work on (the improvement of) his or her language skills. Daily practice shows that the structural embedding of the Literacy houses concept requires an extension of the concept to include not only language skills but all essential skills. Essential skills are the skills needed for life, learning and work. They provide the foundation for learning all other skills and enable people to evolve and adapt to change. The main research question of the project was: 'How can we extend our current Literacy houses concept to include all essential skills and transform it into a centre of development?' We focused on participation in its broadest sense. In doing so, we selected two main themes which were relatively new to the Netherlands: creativity and employability. In our original application we used the terms 'creation' and 'employment', but during the course of the project we found that 'creativity' and 'employability' were more suitable terms. For the theme 'creativity' we formulated the following research question: In what way can creativity contribute to personal development for achieving goals in life? Besides the more classical methods for the transfer of knowledge, we researched other - more creative - methods of acquiring essential skills or methods that lead to a better embedding of lessons learned. Over 50% of the people in the Netherlands with low essential skills are employed. Consequently, employers are a very important partner in the improvement of essential skills. They can help in finding and - even more importantly - reaching the target group. In addition, they can play an active role in the improvement of their employees’ essential skills. Another perspective involves the effect the improvement of a person’s essential skills can have on his or her ability to find a suitable and fulfilling job. Thus, the following research questions were formulated specifically for the theme 'employability': How can workplace learning help the many adults who struggle with essential skills like literacy and numeracy? How can we turn every workplace into a learning-friendly environment and make high quality workplace learning available to everyone? How can we ensure that jobseekers with a potentially large distance to the labour market acquire the skills and competences they need to find employment? Based on the learning questions of our European project partners, several additional topics were included in the project (e.g. in the programmes of our work visits). Think of attention for digital skills and the closing of the digital gap, ways in which to reach socially excluded people, the role of the government and working with volunteers. The project consisted of several activities: Kick-off (5 September 2018), International conference 'Brick by brick' (6 September 2018), work visit to Wales (24-27 June 2018), work visit to Belgium (12-14 November 2018), work visit to Norway (20-23 January 2019), final meeting project partners (24 June 2019) and the International conference 'Join us on the yellow brick road' (25 June 2019). In addition to these activities, we had regular contact with all project partners throughout the project, via mail, telephone or Starleaf/Facetime/Skype. The reports for all work visits as well as the evaluation of the international conference on 25 June 2019 are included as an appendix. All findings, experiences and insights obtained during the course of the project have been processed in the following three intellectual inputs: Case study 'Essential Creativity: the relationship between creativity and the process of learning essential skills', Case study 'The inseparable link between essential skills and employability' and Toolkit for Essential skills houses. These intellectual outputs are available via the Cubiss and Epale websites and have also been included as an appendix. Practice shows that the link between essential skills and creativity and employability has become more important and topical during the course of our project. This means that many organisations have closely monitored the developments within the project. Several new insights have also already been put into practice. So-called employer-teams are using the input from European best practice to activate employers in Brabant (either directly or via trade unions or branch organisations), Nieuwe Veste is putting its new model into practice and the extended toolkit is also already being used by Literacy Houses throughout the Netherlands. Our European partners have also indicated that they are using the obtained insights to make new contacts or to set up new activities. We will from now on also structurally monitor the impact of our project on the actual target groups.