Outside-In

Addressing the needs of the long-term unemployed, migrants, refugees, asylum seekers and ethnic minorities requires great skills and dedication. And yet, anecdotally at least, educators working with these most marginalised groups tend to be the least trained and least resourced. An in-service training to support the continuing professional development of adult educators is essential if new and innovative approaches to engaging marginalised adults back into lifelong learning are to be developed.

The OutsideIN project will develop and implement an entirely new in-service training programme and a handbook to support the continuing professional development of adult educators. An educational toolkit along with a comprehensive set of 15 resources addressing key areas of competence will be made available to frontline adult education staff to support their work with marginalised adults and a personalised online learning environment will be developed. These resources will be made available online to all interested parties without restrictions, in line with the open access requirements of the ERASMUS+ programme.

Each partner will organise a learning event in their local area with the specific task of engaging marginalised adults. A final conference will be held in Ireland to present the resources developed and national campaigns will be organised in each partner country to present the policy document produced.

A minimum of 3 frontline adult educators from each partner country will attend the transnational training event to be held in Malta. This event will support the realisation of a cascade training model: a minimum of 10 frontline adult educators will complete the first iteration of the in-service training in each partner country during the project lifecycle with the support of the 3 educators who participated in the transnational training event.

OutsideIN will be presented as an example of best practice and will clearly demonstrate that even the hardest target groups to reach can be encouraged to participate in learning. Increasing the participation rates of marginalised adults in education and training will have a considerable impact on the social inclusion objectives of Member States and on the realisation of a more fair and equitable society for all in Europe.