Case studies
Introduction
This week’s case studies present 2 practices for making adult learning tailored to learners’ needs i.e. the central element in the upskilling process. These practices focus on the individual’s considerations, goals for the future and personal preferences. Read the sections to learn more about them.
Citizens’ Curriculum
The Citizens’ Curriculum is a locally led, innovative, holistic approach to adult basic skills training focusing on English, maths, digital, civic, health and financial capabilities. The one of the program’s most interesting feature is that it allows learners to have a say in designing the curriculum content through careful contextualisation. This helps ensuring that what they learn fits well with their life and work-related objectives.
The Citizens’ Curriculum applies a capabilities approach including the following areas:
- civic capability (read more)
- digital capability (read more)
- financial capability (read more)
- health capability (read more)
- literacy language (read more)
- numeracy (read more)
Watch the following video with tutors, learners taking part in the Citizens’ Curriculum pilot programs!
Source: Learning & Work Institute.
On L&W’s website, you can also find a guide that is called the Citizens’ Curriculum Activity Pack for Participatory Learning that provides tutors, educators delivering the Citizens’ Curriculum with a number of methods, tools and activities that they can use to best utilise the potential of the program. We highly recommend to take a look at this document as it exhibits tangible tools for educators to help their learners participate in the learning process actively!
You can additionally find a series of podcasts that describe a number of case studies in which Citizen’s Curriculum was adopted.
Hungarian adaptation of SVEB’s Go model
GO as a model for training low-qualified adults has originally been designed and developed by the Swiss Federation for Adult Learning that is the national umbrella organisation for adult education and operates as a professional association and pressure group.
The GO in Hungary
The main focus of the Go-Model is to enhance the low-skilled workforce’s efficiency by lifting their basic skills.
SMEs have an important stake in the Hungarian economy:
- 99.9% of Hungarian companies are SMEs,
- they contribute to 56% of the national GDP and
- employ roughly about 75% of total employees of the corporate sector.
SMEs often find it difficult to hire people with appropriate qualifications but the lack of flexible, close-to-site training possibilities hinders them to raise competences inside the company. Hungarian companies and especially SMEs are more reluctant to support the training of their workforce than their European equivalents (app. 50% or less against 70% in Europe).
The overall participation in adult learning is very low in Hungary. Eurostat’s comparative figures show that the rate of any kind of learning activities of Hungarian population aged 25-64 is one of the lowest rates among the EU-27 countries. The lack of competence development creates a constant growth barrier especially for the local SMEs in the rural areas.
Key steps of the Go-Model
- Identification of occupation-specific situations and essential skills.
- Employee skills assessment and identification of mismatch.
- Basic skills development based on the employer’s expectations and employee’s training needs.
- Steps before and after the training to ensure that achieved learning outcomes are integrated into everyday work-based practices.
- Evaluation of the learning process.
Watch Zsolt Vincze’s presentation from the EBSN Secretariat and the Association for Lifelong Learning in Hungary introducing how Hungary adopted GO in the COVID-hit era. Mr Vincze’s talk was held at the 2021 annual EBSN conference in Malta.
Source: European Basic Skills Network.
You can access the slides of the presentation here.
Read another case study of the GO from Hungary here in English.
