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Workshop C
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Workshop A |
Workshop B |
Workshop C |
Workshop D
Workshop C - Session 2
Aontas is the Irish word for unity, and it is the name of our National Association for Adult Education. We are a membership organisation and we have more than 300 members who come from different sectors of adult education, both statutory and voluntary. In recent years the biggest growth area has been in the voluntary and community sector, and especially in the area of women's education. Irish women make up 49.3% of the population of working age in the Republic of Ireland. Just one-third of Irish women, compared to 71% of Irish men, are in the official labour force. Over a third of the labour force are women, and this is the lowest female participation rate in all of the European Union. 36% of mothers are in the labour force, and for lone mothers it is as low as 20%. Risk Recently an interesting piece of research was carried out in Ireland which has found that people most at risk are lone women who do not have access to education and training. Women are concentrated in a narrow range of jobs, and over 80% of them are in service jobs. They make up the majority of part-time and casual and low paid workers, and they earn less than men. They earn in fact 65% of the average wage that is earned by men. Women make up 69% of those who are not in the labour force, and in the Republic of Ireland 98.5% of those engaged in home duties are women, making up a number of 650,000 people. Women in the home are unpaid, they're uncounted, they're economically dependent and they are excluded from mainstream programmes because they are not on the live register as being unemployed. Learning Groups It is no surprise that an organisation like ours has attracted in the last 5 years hundreds of groups of locally based women who provide services in their own communities because they are excluded from mainstream education and training for a number of reasons - some structural barriers and other issues which include lack of child care, the timing of curriculum and the kinds of courses that are offered in the mainstream. Women themselves have established groups, learning groups, in their own communities and come together to provide for themselves. This is where our locally based women's groups have grown from. They started in the mid '80s and they have mushroomed during the '90s. The groups were small; they were established by women themselves in their own communities; they were voluntary; they did not have any resources; they brought together women from the home, and provided child care, support, information and the first point of access for people who normally do not access education and training in the mainstream. They are self-organised and managed, and there are now over 1000 of them in the country. They are supported by small grants which come from our Department of Social Welfare, now called the Department of Social Family & Community Affairs. Establishing Needs Aonthas began to look at what these groups needed. We have in the organisation a very effective consultative process which we use to try and establish the needs of the groups who are our members. But we had no money to do this as usual, so we began to access funding through the European Community Initiative NOW, New Opportunities for Women, in 1991, to try and support the work that the women were doing on the ground. Our approach is about equality, ,its focus is on disadvantaged women. It is a collective focus rather than an individual one. It is consultative. The people involved in it talk to us about what they want. The target groups decide what kind of provision they want, where they want it, the times they want it, and how it is evaluated And so in effect a woman can come in from a basic education and work her way through from personal development, confidence building, through to accredited courses which are beginning to come on stream now. Our approach has been a bottom-up approach. We have built on and support the strategies women themselves have developed. We have taken that and we have used the strengths the women's movement in Ireland. The approach is empowering. Its focus is on broad outcomes and on women's well-being and increased options. So there are two parts to it. It is not just about entry to the workforce; it is about developing yourself as a human person with a number of dimensions which are physical, spiritual, intellectual and economic. But it is also strategic and we have a long way to go still, and at the moment we are a bit worried about the approaches being taken in Departments like the Social Community and Family Affairs, because interestingly they have broadened their focus out into families and the gender issue has fallen down through the net as it often does when things like this are diluted. Objectives The objectives of our project were as follows. We knew that these groups were an important access point for women, and they were struggling to survive in the face of no resources. The women's groups organised themselves into management committees, and they in turn then provided a whole range of adult education fordisadvantaged people. It is not necessarily just women who come in through the women's groups. It is much more extensive and includes a wide range of people. Our approach was strategic. We decided to target the women's management groups and train them professionally to help them manage their affairs, to develop ways of getting resources and also to put their issues on the political agenda, which is the most important objective of what they do. We wanted to improve the capacity of the groups to deliver their services so that this would remain not just an access point for women initially, but also a progression route which could be linked in from the community into mainstream education. Our project activities were as follows. We set up an information and advice service which was telephone-based and outreach-based. We developed an information pack for the daytime groups which included a whole range of information from how the education system is organised in the Republic of Ireland, where to source funding, how to set up your own groups, how to get tutors, how to train people, how to develop accreditation routes, and how to be strategic in political lobbying. Part of that was through the organisation of a social analysis and political lobbying course. The second part of our project was community based training programmes. And over the two years of this project we delivered to the management groups as a collective a set of skills which they needed. Some of the groups needed basic management skills, some of the groups are becoming more involved with statutory partnerships. It depended on what people asked us to do. So the training officer would approach the groups, finds out what their needs were, and then deliver a series of training packages to help them. We also developed a third level access course for women from non-formal educational backgrounds who had a record of working in their community. And we developed an access course with a local third level college which allowed 18 women to pursue a course in women's development and political development. We tracked the women and many of the women have gone on to other accredited courses in third level education. We established two particular policy working groups - one on the issue of access, and one of the issue of accreditation. We have been getting on important committees that are within the Departments of Education and Science, and in Social Welfare, which are looking at issues like the structural barriers which are there for women wanting to go back into the workforce. Finally, we had a transnational network, which of course allowed us to exchange the work that we did, and we worked with a group in Britain here and one in East Germany, and that allowed us to share some of our practice and it also taught us some things that we could use for ourselves. That is the kernel of the project.
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