We had hoped through the workshadowing to work with other similiar providers of adult education to find solutions to issues such as Intergration and retention of migrant learners to mainstream courses, increasing the numbers of learners on STEM programmes, and finding a way of connecting Guidance staff with propspective clients speckled accross the Cavan Monaghan region. We have found that only a small proportion of our ESOL learners remain with us after they have completed basic language courses to undertake additional education or community education programmes. We found that these learners in the main remain within their communities and we were looking at ways to encourage their integration into our maintstream programmes in cookery, ICT, Horticulture etc. In addition we find it difficult to attract learners to STEM type courses such as Maths or numeracy and we had hoped to try to find some solutions to this by finding a partner that may have approached STEM provision in a different way and acheived success. Our hope was that we might be able to reproduce their activities here in Cavan and Monaghan.
We undertook our first Erasmus project in 2016- when 10 adult education tutors travelled. The feedback we recevied from this was really positive, many tutors returned and shared the ideas that they had learned with their colleagues and it created a real buzz within our service. Tutors returning from this project were able to act as champions for new technologies, introducing apps for the first time into classrooms. As the experience of the first project was so positive it was agreed that we would seek future funding opporunities for Adult ed co-ordinators; in the hope that a combination of workshadowoing and structured courses would help us to deal with some of the challenges we faced in Adult Ed with fresh eyes and new perspectives.