The New Skills Agenda recently launched by the European Commission speaks about Europe “facing a basic skills challenge.” It is well known that more than 70 million adults in Europe are lacking adequate reading and writing skills, and even more have poor numeracy and digital skills, putting them at risk of unemployment, poverty and social exclusion. Reaching this target group remains a challenge for the adult education systems. There is enough evidence to show that adults with low levels of basic skills do not generally participate in adult education but show a great intrinsic motivation in helping their children with school. Can be therefore concluded that family learning represents an alternative positive model approach to help adults progress with their skills and re-engage them with learning. In this sense, the project proposes an integrated approach that will help adults with low levels of basic skills to re-engage with learning through an innovative family learning programme. The intervention will focus on three major dimensions: - Improving basic skills levels through family literacy activities (reading and writing, numeracy, digital skills) - Developing the learning to learn competence (re-engaging with learning and empowering adults) - Increasing parental understanding of school processes and pedagogies (enhancing parent- school relations and partnerships) The direct target group of the project are adults, the family learning programme being intended to offer a second chance and bring adults back to improve their basic skills motivated by the desire to support their children. Family learning also brings wider benefits to the indirect target group, which is constituted by children, schools and education practitioners, decision makers at local and national level. At the level of target groups, the following objectives will lead to the achievement of the project purpose: - contribute to the upskilling of adult's basic skills by designing and innovative, integrated curriculum for family learning and the subsequent training materials - increase capacity on relevant stakeholders (schools, NGO's, other educational organisation) to support and promote the implementation of family learning programmes - provide evidence and example of good practice for the decision making process by piloting the project methodology with the direct target groups Throughout the implementation of the project we will reach at least 2000 participants by means of dissemination activities and conducting an inquiry on perceptions and perspectives towards family learning; develop and pilot a family learning curriculum; create a resource pack for parents and adult educators. The impact at the level of target groups consists in the following: • Professionalisation of educators to work with low skilled adults and deliver the family learning curriculum; In total, 25 facilitators ( 5 per country) will be involved in the piloting activities. • Five schools/educational centres will be selected for the pilot implementation of the family learning curriculum; creating thus increased capacity in those organisations to initiate and further deliver family learning programmes • Enhanced access to learning opportunities and re-engagement with learning for low skilled adults, not only by developing an integrated approach towards family learning facilitation, but also directly involving 150 adults (30 per country) in the pilot training activities of the curriculum. • Increased cooperation and development of partnerships cross key actors in the field, such as local authorities, schools, NGO's, providers of social and educational services etc.
In the context of the project every single activity got an extremely important contribution at the level of partnership and led to the achievement of wider benefits of family learning. The ''starting point'' of the FamSkill project was based on the challenge of basic skills which was one of the main topics on the New Skills Agenda launched by the European Commission. In the background of the FamSkill project was carried out a genuine research on the ''educational stage'' of reading and writing skills, as well as numeracy and digital skills. It was identified a major risk of unemployment, poverty and social exclusion in the profile of low skilled adults. Thus, there was an urgent need to address family learning as an alternative positive model approach to help adults to re-engage with learning. The participation in the education system and in basic skills programmes was even lower than expected. In this way, a solid partnership with extensive knowledge in European projects had been identified. The AHEM (Turkey) as the coordinator of the project together with the COMU (Turkey), CPIP (Romania), DOCUMENTA (Spain), CIK Trebnje (Slovenia) and MANKO (Poland) worked intensively for 2 years in a permanent collaboration to achieve all the objectives of the FamSkill project. The main objectives of the FamSkill project were to: - contribute to the upskilling of adult's basic skills; - increase capacity of relevant stakeholders (schools, NGO's, other educational organisation) to support and promote the implementation of family learning programmes; - provide evidence and example of good practice for the decision making process. The objectives mentioned above were met in an extremely useful way based on the content and materials developed for all three Intellectual Outputs. The undertaken activities required the involvement of representatives from the main target group of the FamSkill project. The profile of the participants involved in the activities of the project met all the necessary requirements. Below are mentioned the activities in which the low skilled adults, schools and education practitioners, decision makers were involved: - Intellectual Output 1 ''Inquiry on perceptions and perspectives towards family learning'': participation in the completion of the feedback questionnaire, interview grid and focus group session. - Intellectual Output 2 ''Family learning curriculum'': participation in the development of the content for the training curriculum based on Bloom's Taxonomy model on three main dimensions: ICT skills, numeracy, reading and writing. It required feedback and content analysis to fit the ''missing'' learning needs. - Intellectual Output 3 ''Resource pack for parents and educators'' : participation in the development of content for the Guide for parents and Guide for educators. Based on the feedback received regularly from the representatives of the target groups (educators and parents) there were created extremely useful learning and teaching materials. - interactive platform to support family learning and foster a collaborative online environment as part of the IO3: participation in the choice of design and structure to be easier for those interested in using the platform. In terms of number and type/profile of participants the consortium took into account all the necessary requirements. In this way, the main following numbers were achieved during the lifetime of the FamSkill project: - 2 staff members from every partner organization; - a total number of 327 participants in the implementation of the IO1 (as stated in every national report); - a total number of 104 educators and at least 150 adults who participated in the pilot training activities (as stated in every national report); - a total number of 157 participants in total who attended the raising awareness workshops organised by the AHEM, CPIP, MANKO, CIK Trebnje and DOCUMENTA (as stated in the national report and list of participants for the ''Raising awareness workshop'' - ME); - 10-15 trained trainers who took part in the staff training activity. The most visible impact was seen at the level of: - own organization and internal systems. There was an increased capacity of staff to support and promote family learning, but also to support low skilled adults. - direct target group representatives involved in the main undertaken activities (parents, low skilled adults); - organisations (schools, educational centers) selected to participate in the pilot training activities; - key actors and stakeholders by providing them with a comprehensive methodology and resources to enhance family learning; - decision making process at local, national and European levels by providing strong and reliable evidence for further policy making in the field; - final beneficiaries by improving their access to relevant adult learning provision.