Evaluation and Valorisation are crucial steps in creating viable strategies with long-term benefits. Yet many AE policies on the local and regional levels are not systematically evaluated. This is partly due to policy makers lacking the appropriate tools . CREATE 2 EVALUATE addresses this gap by designing a set of useful tools and templates to help AE policy makers and agents active in the AE policy processes evaluate existing strategies, draw actionable conclusions and design better strategies in the future. Far from asking policy makers to justify their work it will help them structure their internal work processes more efficiently as well as improve the quality of resulting programmes. To make the new tools available the consortium, consisting of eight partners from seven countries, will adjust the platform designed for the preceding project CREATE to meet the new requirements. CREATE 2 Evaluate is indeed a follow-up of ‘Competitive Regions and Employability of Adults through Education’ (CREATE) which ran from 2017 to 2019. This project aimed and still aims to enhance performance and efficiency in adult education by addressing the gap between EU/national strategies and local/regional implementation as well as the challenge of formulating appropriate AE policy. The goal is to enable policy makers to better coordinate and plan policy, share experiences and enhance inter-regional and cross-border cooperation. To that aim the CREATE consortium created an open resource Toolbox containing useful tools, best practice cases as well as networks for relevant stages of the policy cycle. In collecting tools for the Toolbox it became clear that tools were sorely lacking in one crucial area: evaluation. The original set of tools plus the ones yet to be designed can be found via: http://www.projectcreate.eu/ . In addition to creating the evaluation tools, CREATE 2 EVALUATE will provide support for implementation by designing guiding documents which will facilitate up-take and increase impact at systemic level. Stimulate the debate around the role of evaluation in strategies and the policy cycle to improve the image of evaluation – not as a means to find blame and point fingers, but as a way to improve the processes and outcomes to the benefit of all involved. Additionally, agents interested in working with the new tools for evaluation can also benefit from the existing virtual community established under CREATE. The virtual community highlights the cooperative approach run by the consortium who believe they can only create viable instruments for the AE sector by incorporating the existing expertise from practice as much as possible. Beyond the lifetime of the project partners aim to enable players in the AE field to exchange experiences and cooperate more stringently to achieve more sustainable and efficient results informed by the sector’s real needs. The consortium will collaborate with sector representatives to pilot and refine the tools in order to create easy-to-use templates that can be applied directly. The primary target groups of CREATE 2 EVALUATE are policy makers, managers in AE provider organisations and AE umbrellas at regional, national as well as EU levels, because they are centrally involved in designing policy and programmes and/or in putting strategies and programmes into action. They represent two perspectives on the processes but are equally affected by them and thus both profit from transparent evaluation procedures. All tools and other project results will be available as Open Educational Resources in accordance with Erasmus+ guidelines.
The project’s aim was two-fold: developing easy-to-use resources for policy makers to aid them improve policy creation processes as well as to inspire a renewed debate about evaluation with a fresh perspective. Evaluation tools fill a crucial gap in the AE policy system and help policy makers improve programmes that correspond to practice requirements. Both policy makers and practitioners shall benefit from the innovation – policy makers because the tools will make their work processes more efficient and practitioners because they will work with programmes that better meet their needs. The consortium wanted to create accessible tools accompanied by information on how to use them to enable policy makers to better reflect their internal processes when setting up programmes. The second objective was to engage the community of peers in dialogue and to share experiences. Finally, partners wanted to give fresh impetus to the debate and infuse a new perspective on evaluation.
Evaluation and Valorisation are crucial steps in creating viable political strategies with long-term benefits. However, the policy creation process at regional and local levels hardly ever come under scrutiny, a fact, that has been especially deplored by providers who feel their abundant expertise is not used efficiently in the policy process and their voices ‘from the front lines’ not heard enough. But why are AE policies not evaluated systematically on all levels? A previous project called “Competitive Regions and Employability of Adults through Education’ (CREATE 2017-2019)” as well as literature quoted in the application, e.g. DG AEC 2016, DG EMPL, Kubera 2017 had identified a lack of appropriate, ready-to-use tools. This need for low-threshold tools that help AE policy makers to evaluate strategies, draw actionable conclusions and design better strategies in the future, thus, constituted the main reason for applying for this project. Secondly, the project addressed the lack of a constructive debate around the role of evaluation in strategies and policy creation. Rather than placing blame and pointing fingers, evaluation should be considered a way to improve the processes and outcomes to the benefit of all involved.