Disadvantaged adult learners like migrants, other minorities, early school leavers and women face a significant gap between the quantity and quality of their life related and occupationally relevant knowledge and competences they have and their lack of corresponding qualifications that are valued in education and on the labour market. This pertains to outcomes of prior and current learning in informal and non-formal contexts, as well as formal qualifications acquired outside of the EU territory. Our experience is that especially for disadvantaged learners in adult learning, access to validation that would translate their competences into an increased employability and social inclusion is still lacking.One background is that despite EU-wide advances in validation of learning, there is not yet a coherent approach across or within EU member states, but a lose mix of diverse, sometimes contradicting policies, structures and practices. Adult education has also not been a focus sector, and its validation relevant links to other validation stakeholders have yet to be better established to provide meaningful avenues to formal education and labour market insertion. This poses a challenge especially for small and middle scale adult education providers to identify and implement best practices in validation, including in relation to linkages to other education sectors. This would be a prerequisite for their learners to have access to adequate validation. There also is a discrepancy between the heterogeneity of work related competences held by our learners and validation procedures and practices that are often based on more customary standards of skills and knowledge. This applies especially to the stages of assessment and certification in validation procedures that lead to alternative qualifications taken seriously by employers or that lead to further vocational or higher education. Other problems are the use of assessment methods like written tests that for disadvantaged learners can be unnecessarily challenging. The European Qualifications Framework and corresponding portfolio approaches like Europass CV provide a better correspondence with our learners’ competences, but are underutilised. All this results in an undervaluing and further dis-qualification of disadvantaged learners rather than an adequate appraisal of their competences.The partnership has comprised the following organisations: uniT - Verein für Kultur an der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz (Austria), Associació Catalana de Formació Polivalent Aplicada, Baobab (Spain), Associazione ALPHA (Italy) and the Landesarbeitsgemeinschaft für politisch-kulturelle Bildung in Brandenburg e.V. (Germany).As adult learning providers continuously working with different groups of disadvantaged adult learners, our interest in this partnership was to contribute to improving the access of disadvantaged learners to an adequate validation that translates their individually and economically significant informal, non-formal and foreign formal learning outcomes into qualifications improving their social inclusion. To sharpen and narrow the broad target group of disadvantaged learners we focussed on migrants and refugees - the politically most discussed group of disadvantaged learners over Europe in the last years. But we are definitely sure that a lot of the insights, tools and ideas we developped in the project are also useful for the validation of all the groups of disadvantaged learners. The specific objectives of this project were to a) identify, exchange and test best practices in validation of competences of disadvantaged adult learners, including in relation to linkages to relevant public, private and third sector actors b) identify procedures to systematically incorporate and mainstream best practices in validation in the educational practices of our and similar organisations; c) design and test training courses for adult educators working with disadvantaged learners in order to facilitate their use of and provide guidance on validation in their educational activities incorporating the standards and best practices; d) disseminate intellectual outputs, trainings and training materials to other public, private and third sector adult education providers; e) disseminate recommendations with a special focus on the validation needs of disadvantaged adult learners to inform relevant stakeholders, including in policy making.The main outputs of the project are 1) Report on current validation practices to establish informal and non-formal acquired competences in Austria, Germany, Spain and Italy including good-practice examples.2) Recommendations for improving the process of validation of prior learning in Europe (en)3) Recommendations for improving the process of validation of prior learning in Spain, Germany, Italy and Austria4) Toolkit: Methods of validation of prior learning5) Building up a professional community on Epale and on the blog of our websiteQE

The aim of the project was to create a modern tool to allow diagnosis and analysis of the future careers of young people, as well as provide them with appropriate indicators for their further education path.The final products as a result the project implementation are:1.Career Tree tool.It is a set of diagnostic and support of counseling tools. The diagnostic part contains six inventories for dimensions examining which are relevant to educational and vocational decisions, a battery of cognitive tests and a survey questionnaire regarding the certificates, qualifications and educational and professional achievements. The Career Tree is based on an empirical attitude to tests creation. The Career Tree attends to the needs diagnose, interests and educational and vocational disposition of people aged 15-25 planning their career paths. A set of questionnaires and tests allow to receive a multidimensional diagnosis. The automatically created report provides guidance for the interpretation of results and orientation of advice on career planning, educational and vocational part. The Career Tree also contains additional tools like automatically generated CVs in the Europass standard and creating a portfolio (contains education and career achievements in the career path), that supporting the individual career path of testing people. A set of questionnaires, tests and counseling tools, included under common name Career Tree help career advisors with supporting young people in cyclical and current development planning. 2.CV and portfolio manual - tools included in the Career Tree diagnostic package. The CaT portfolio is useful in a job search and ensures the possibility of presentation of “learning outcomes gained during formal, informal, non-formal education” and career records. The portfolio is a list of the user’s competences related to career development (CV + CaT test results + other uploaded/filled e.g. images, photos, programming code, links to web pages). The portfolio is being created partly automatically after the CaT test user finishes the test. It means that data entered by the user during testing are uploaded and visible as a separate webpage with some data + empty fields with suggestions how to fill them. The link to the user’s individual portfolio may be sent to a potential employer for the recruitment purposes.3. Handbook Career Tree The system of educational-vocational career diagnosis and counseling. In this book was describe the method a set of inventories,tests and questionnaires construction, supporting career planning counseling, bearing the common title Career Tree.It is a diagnostic tool handbook, which contains theoretical and technical bases, allows create diagnostic tool, aims and beneficiary diagnosis, reliability.4. Handbook entitled Career Guidance. Theoretical assumptions and exemplary practices. It is a methodical handbook for career counselors includes theories and foundations of the developed method and practical tips regarding counseling process running. 5.The added value of the project is a handbook Multidimensional adaptive diagnosis in career planning. Design and psychometric adequateness of the Career Tree inventory tool. This book was developed in Polish, English and Spanish. In this book was described method of constructing the set of inventories and tests supporting the career planning process, bearing the common name Career Tree. The structure, psychometric adequateness and the way how to using the whole toolkit on the Internet available are presented. The first part presents the stages of the construction The Career Tree structure and the dimensions of the diagnosis that were included in the toolkit. The second part describes psychometric tests adequateness of the Career Tree package. Instructions how to use the Career Tree tools and rules for interpreting Career Tree's results in educational and vocational counseling, you can find in the handbook for career counselors entitled Career Tree. The system of educational-vocational career diagnosis and counseling, which is a summary of a part of the this book, supplemented with detailed description of results of individual scales. More detailed discussion of the nature of counseling and the tools used in it is included in the book Career Guidance. Theoretical assumptions and exemplary practices, which is a collection of methodological materials supporting career counselors’ work and enabling deepening knowledge about career planning.The Partnership1. University of Economics and Innovation (Poland) – Project Leader;2. Associaciao Baobab (Spain) non-profit organization; 3. KADIS (Slovenia) service provider in the area of career guidance and HR; 4. Bahcesehir University (Turkey) higher education institution; 5. Polish Psychologists’ Association (UK) is a registered charity. The products that were created as part of the project are available in 5 language versions: Polish, English, Turkish, Slovenian and Spanish.

A consortium of six partners mainly from adult and higher education from Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Poland, Spain and UK was established. The over-all aim of the project was to establish training on violence prevention and de-escalation in pre- and primary school settings on a regular basis by developing the social and civic competences in children at an early age. In doing so the project focused on a new angle of violence prevention. The outcomes of the project are based on the assumption that through the development of strong social competences all children become “stronger”. The teachers follow a regular course of activities provided by the project in form of a collection of activities and use arising situations as learning source so that a long-lasting effect on the children is reached. The need for the project stems from the fact that usual violence prevention training starts much later in life – if at all – usually in secondary school. In addition it should also be the task of teachers/educators to develop social competences among children, as violence occurs where children come together. Peer attacks are seen as natural to a certain extent. Although there is a certain degree of natural aggressiveness among (small) children – they still have to learn how to handle it. In real life not only parents but also educators and teachers are often not sure how to deal with such behaviour, do not know what can be considered to be “normal” behaviour yet and what needs special consideration and how to detect bullying. In addition, the development of social competences is a process and cannot be learned in a short course. All planned project phases have been carried out according to plan and all three Intellectual Outputs have been developed, tested and finalized. The project phases included a pre-test, its evaluation, the development, the main-test, its evaluation and the finalizing of materials.In the Pre-Test from March – June 2015 testing took place in six preschools and 13 primary schools. In addition, a class of mentally disabled children were involved in Denmark. Altogether, 26 teachers and up to 400 children were involved in the Pre-test. The main test was carried out from October 2015 till May 2016 and 13 preschools with 28 teachers and 19 primary schools with 84 teachers were reached. Also each partner established a Regional Steering Group (RSG) to involve practitioners and experts right from the start. Meetings took place three times during the project. Five transnational project meetings have been carried out according to plan and the last partner meeting in Lodz, Poland, was combined with a conference “Strong children shape the future”. The conference was held at Społeczna Akademia Nauk in Łódź, Poland, on 27th June 2016, with more than 50 participants from educational background, mainly teachers and future teachers. After opening introduction of the project Stronger Children and an introduction of the situation of child bullying in the partner countries, the participants could choose from 4 different workshops, held by some of partners or other experts from Akademia. Further a range of Dissemination activities have been carried out, including a TV report “Jak se bránit šikaně” about project SCH in Sama Doma, ČT1, in the Czech public TV in October 2015. The project has also seen the production of a range of promotional videos – either for Facebook, dissemination of partners and/or the Website. The project established a channel on YouTube as a repository of videos. Currently seven videos are uploaded with total of 547 views. (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9Jrv65zR7F5dpgAmv524Fw). A beneficial result was also achieved by the Czech partner. They reached an accreditation of the Collection of Activities by their Ministry of Education, Sport and Youth for the obligatory further education of teachers in preschools and primary schools. Please refer to www.strongerchildren.eu for the project outputs and visit us on Facebook www.facebook.com/strongerchildren

The PREPEI project (Protecting Enhancing Participating Educating Informing) addressed the issues of learning and informing the entire school community in relation to the importance of bullying as a factor of school dropout by providing them innovative tools. The project is particularly relevant for 2 out of the 8 key competences for lifelong learning highlighted in the EU policy documents: Personal, social and learning, and Cultural awareness and expression (Key competences for lifelong learning – Factsheet 2017).The question of interest for the project is: How to recognize and respond early and effectively to behaviors that can lead to bullying and school drop out through information, awareness raising and training as first and essential steps that must be done to cope with this pan- European problem. The project aimed to prepare school community of taking more responsibility in managing early school leaving and bullying.Objectives:1.The overall objective of the project was to create, test and implement an innovative educative and informative program for sensitization of school communities and prevention of school violence and bullying in order to reduce the school dropout.2.Development of an innovative toolbox to support the overall first objective, to help train and inform school community through the implementation of six Intellectual Outputs, (IO 1 – Video, IO 2 - Teachers Training module, IO 3 - Manuals for Teachers & Educators, IO 4 – Video Game, IO 5 – Communication Platform, IO 6 – Webinar, IO 7 - Train the trainer course). Namely, the concrete tools that have been developed are:- Video game using shadow theatre heroes,- Video using the traditional shadow theatre heroes,- Training manual with guidelines how to use the video,- Webinars dealing with violence among students,All the above tools are user friendly for educators that are interested to coordinate the training and develop skills in managing bullying by providing information, ready to use materials and a step-by-step description of the procedure.The consortium consisted of 6 partners from 5 countries, namely:1.The Smile of the Child (GR)2.Ellinogermaniki Aggogi S.A. (GR)3.Asociatia Direct (RO)4.Baobab Association (SP)5.Association for equal opportunities SEMPER (MKD)6.Nadja Centre Foundation (BUG)To reach the objectives, all partners worked together on creating conditions for the implementation and development of a consolidated pedagogical approach respecting the cultural particularities of each country. That has been achieved by developing innovative tools with use of shadow theatre. The rationale of the methodology used was that for each project activity one project partner undertook the role of the task leader, presenting guidelines and support about how the activity should be implemented, and other partners were the participating partners in the activity, pursuing to implement the guidelines in their own context, if that was the case.The project organized three multiplier events in Spain and North Macedonia with 128 participants where all six Intellectual Outputs were presented to a wide audience. Furthermore in all countries, 612 educators participated in piloting activities, 628 educators trained on how to use the tools of the project and through awareness raising activities at schools have been reached more than 4.413 students, 2.756 parents and 567 teachers on the issue of bullying and school drop out.One main result of PREPEI project is the tangible output - a toolbox consisting of videos, teachers training module, manuals for teachers & educators and video game. These products target educators, school leaders, students and different stakeholders in the field of education. The training material contains guidelines, descriptions, theories and evaluation tools (in cases where this was applicable). The outputs are usable and applicable to primary and secondary schools, using all project’s outputs not only separately but also but also in combination.Another important result is the intangible outcome of increased awareness of the participants and other stakeholders getting involved with the project, about how working with the project’s outputs can lead to have multiplied positive effects on educators and students.The consortium believes that the project achieved to disseminate knowledge and practical examples about how to responsibly manage bullying and stimulating thinking and behaviors in all educational settings in order to promote equity and inclusion for special vulnerable groups facing challenges.