Ms Berni Brady:

AONTAS welcomes this opportunity to present to the committee. I come from a different perspective because AONTAS is not a provider-organisation. We are the national adult learning organisation that advocates for adult education and promotes adult education and we have also been a champion of community education from the 1980s right through until now.

In this short presentation I want to focus on what community education has done, how we understand community education, who takes part in it, what are its outcomes and some of the challenges it might face in the context of the changes that are taking place. AONTAS has a community education network which comprises approximately 140 groups of people involved in the provision of community education and they are independently managed groups. The focus of my presentation is on those rather than on the statutory groups.

Community education is delivered in both the statutory and non-statutory sector. Within the statutory sector it is delivered through the education and training boards and is co-ordinated by local community education facilitators. Within the non-statutory sector it is delivered by a number of independently managed not-for-profit providers who receive financial support from a number of sources, including Government Departments, charities and various other sources. Currently approximately 58,000 learners participated in the education and training board-funded community education programmes but we reckon that a further 30,000 learners also participate in programmes funded by the independently managed groups.

Community education is effective because the range of supports available to learners through community education supports the capacity of people to progress through the qualifications framework on to further education. It includes being located in the communities where people are based; having skilled outreach staff to connect with "hard to reach" potential learners; focusing on the whole person and their circumstances - economic, social, cultural and emotional; providing supports such as child care, mentoring, study supports, guidance counselling, literacy, number and IT supports; and providing follow-up support after formal courses are completed.

Community education attracts people who are the most distant from education, training and the labour market. They include early school learners, lone parents, long-term unemployed, ethnic minorities and people experiencing physical and mental illness, addiction and other kinds of problems. They would normally be people who would find it difficult to come back into an institutionalised setting or into a school setting.

Many of the learners who become involved in community education do not feel that learning is for them, having had very poor experiences of the formal school system.

Some people understand that community education only offers either non-accredited programmes or programmes at levels 1 to 3. They do offer non-accredited programmes, which are very important for people coming back into learning for the first time since leaving school, but in many cases they also offer programmes up to level 7. Some of the case studies I have presented in the presentation examine programmes supplied by organisations like An Cosán, for example.

Community education has a number of outcomes for people that include skills, mainstream employment, pathways to further education and training and work experience programmes but they also include personal development and confidence building, active citizenship, community activity, social inclusion and connection. Something that we have tried to do in Aontas was to demonstrate how community education could be seen as a valid labour activation measure because we believe that most people want to have a decent job, make a decent living and be able to look after their children. They can do that in different ways. People who come in through community education need many more supports than people who come in through mainstream further education and training. That is where the difference lies.

In developing it as we go forward we need to consider that it takes longer to deal with people who are the most marginalised. People require more supports and they need more help to come into the system. We are glad to see that SOLAS, and I was very involved in the SOLAS process, has recognised community education as an important strand of further education and training but the challenge will be to examine how to knit in a system for the support of community education that takes a longer time and that cannot compete with the outcomes of better funded and resourced further education and training. When we are measuring outcomes in terms of the numbers of people returning to employment, the two areas do not compare. A homeless person or a person with very low skills will take a longer time to come in and work their way through the system but if there are connections to the broader further education and training service, we believe that with good service level agreements we can develop a progression system that would help people to move forward.

I refer to a number of challenges, the first of which is the funding challenge. Community organisations that are independently managed sometimes get funding from as many as 14 sources, and all of those require different reporting mechanisms. They could be Government Departments, Pobal or whatever; we have listed them in the presentation. Those organisations might fund separate community education initiatives such as tutor hours, for example, or support hours. If we want to look at this in a holistic way, we must have a whole organisation approach to funding that includes learner support, overheads, operational management, education provision and support and supervision.

A second challenge is one with which the members are familiar. I will not go into the detail of it because they heard it last week. It is Quality and Qualifications Ireland, QQI, fees for qualification, which effectively would block out many of the organisations that currently provide accredited programmes within community education. I have put together a short case study from An Cosán, a community education centre in Jobstown, Tallaght, which is an area of high disadvantage and high unemployment. It gives a description of the way An Cosán develops training programmes for people from basic education through to level 7. One of the key aspects is that overall, out of 1,500 learners who have engaged in the early childhood education programmes in the past ten years at An Cosán, data indicates that 1,200 of them are now in employment. They may take longer and may require more supports but we believe that community education can be an effective activation measure and one that has a vocational outcome. We believe also that in doing that we must take account of where people are coming from, the supports they need, the length of time that needs to be put in, and how they will connect with the broader further education and training service.