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 Handmade Wellbeing project was to enhance and expand professional competences of arts and crafts professionals and to design and carry out creative activities in elderly care settings. Increasingly, the arts and crafts professionals are employed in challenging community engagement areas that are outside their traditional core skills and abilities.Evidently, arts and crafts offer creative and empowering activities that would be important to include in the activities of wellbeing and health-related services. The targets of the Handmade Wellbeing project were:• to expand professional competences of arts and crafts specialists to work in the elderly care sector• to co-create a novel educational model, in cross-sectoral collaboration both nationally and internationally, for working creatively with older people• to research the pedagogy suitable for working with older people• to research links between creative activity and overall wellbeing of older people• to distribute educational models, working methods and research results. The project was carried out by four European partners. The University of Helsinki was the coordinator of the project. The Department of Educational Sciences at the University of Helsinki is one of the leading European units providing teacher education and engaging in education research. The department houses the Craft Teacher Education which was participating in the Handmade Wellbeing project. The British partner, Superact is a not-for-profit Community Interest Company that uses creative engagement and the arts to develop and deliver a wide range of social impact projects. Based in the UK but with an international reach, Superact delivers creative interventions that make a positive difference in key areas of community development, skills development, employability and health and wellbeing. The Austrian partner, KUNSTLABOR Graz is part of uniT-arts association at the Karl Franzens University Graz. It consists of a multidisciplinary team of artists from various disciplines (film, photography, fine arts, dance and theater), psychologists, education experts and scientists. KUNSTLABOR Graz addresses elderly people, youth and migrants. The Estonian partner, Viljandi Culture Academy, is one of the four colleges of the University of Tartu. The main partner of the Handmade Wellbeing project was the Department of Estonian Native Crafts. Their purpose is to use the cultural higher education potential to promote new working fields and opportunities, such as the care sector that their students were practising in during the Handmade Wellbeing project. Each partner arranged training for art and craft students and professionals to work and develop their professional competences in elderly care centres. Each partner arranged a learning and training week for the other partners. Through observations, visits and practical participatory activities, the partners got a good understanding of the practices that each partner were using. The reflection sessions during each training week formed the basis for developing the educational model together. Each partner arranged a seminar for the stakeholders, and an exhibition about the project activities. The project activities were shown on the website of the project, and they were presented in the international conferences and at local events, such as public lectures and interviews to the media. Throughout the project, research activities were carried out to collect the data.During the project, many arts and crafts students and teachers received training on working with older people in care settings. For many of them, this provided new employment possibilities; for example in the UK, some of them have since been employed to run monthly art activities in local care homes. All the learners were sent an anonymous questionnaire about how satisfied they were on the project, and how it has benefited their professional development. The responses reflect mainly positive learning experiences.The ongoing research was introduced in articles and conferences and thus reached a wider audience. The collaboratively produced handbook is published in the project website and in the websites and other media in each partner country, as well as EPALE. The handbook is available for everyone to access. The social and health care staff in the participating care centres learned new skills and methods to arrange creative activities for older people. The participating partners and their learners have broadened their understanding of the European approach to the topic. The produced Handmade Wellbeing Handbook is available online for all the interested stakeholders to utilize in their work. The research results will be published in the coming years to fulfill the need for evidence-based scientific basis about the required creative pedagogy for older people. The results will benefit the future work in the care settings, and the training to work in them.

The project is aiming at developing a state-of-the-art approach in the provision of common European values to adult learners and beyond. The methodology will be basing on the principles of Cultural Intelligence (CQ). Cultural intelligence is a rather new methodology that can be understood as the capability to relate and work effectively across cultures. This approach will be transferred and further developed as a practice model for European Intelligence (EQ), being easily useable and transferable to different learning environments working in the provision of common European values.In the past years the attractiveness of Europe as a common idea and model basing on shared values and principles have seemed to decrease constantly in many member countries throughout Europe. On the other hand, respect for shared European values has always underpinned EU actions in education and youth. In 2015, the European Commission and the EU Ministers for Education committed to “strengthen their actions to ensure that children and young people acquire social, civic and cultural competences and enhance their critical thinking”. In order to regain a stronger commitment of European citizens towards common European values, new and attractive measures have to be made at all societal levels including the education of youth and adults.Target groups of the project will primarily be teaching staff, stakeholders and multipliers in adult and youth education. The overall objective is to build up the target groups’ capacities in teaching European values by using the EQ methodology. Voluntary staff (i.e. in integration courses) shall be addressed as well. End beneficiaries of the project are adult and young learners, including newly arrived migrants and refugees. During the project lifetime, it is envisaged that about 375 participants will benefit directly from the project results.Main result of the project will be an electronically accessible, multilingual guide book to the European Intelligence (EQ) methodology with recommendations, teaching examples and resources, enabling teaching staff, stakeholders and other learning environments like self-directed learning circles to improve their skills and abilities in European values teaching and learning. Multiplier events will take place at regional level in order to promote the project outcomes. Additionally the project will provide the following results:- A common documented understanding of fundamental values in Europe, taking into account the different experience and conditions in the participating countries;- A joint internal communication platform, clearly documenting the individual project steps;- A project website, where project results will be presented, in order to support the dissemination of the project outcomes (multi-lingual);- Project newsletters (at least 4 during the project lifetime).The consortium is bringing together partners from different regions across Europe, combining experience in collaborating on the level of European cooperation with the broadest possible spectrum of activities in policy and practice areas related to teaching democracy, value-based learning and human rights education.

"When the partners applied for the project many refugees - mainly from Syria - came to Europe, especially to Germany, Austria and Sweden. Amongst them were highly educated people, students, people with diploma etc. From an ethical, economic and social point of view it was and is important to try to integrate those people as fast as possible and to find ways to bring them into the labour market, into jobs, which match their qualifications and competences. This project tried to support refugees and migrants finding a proper track of integration. Its main focus was to support refugees and migrants to get access to higher education, especially universities. The consortium wanted to work on this overall aim by adressing important institutions of education - institutions and NGOS of adult education and universities. Adult education can help the refugees to make their path to universites easier and more effective by different means: language courses, collecting, assessing the competences of the target group and making them visible and offering guidance. In cooperation with universities and other institutions adult education can create paths to make the access to higher education easier and to support processes of validation of given competences and qualifications. The participating organisations were organisations working exactly at the interface with universities, VNB with the open university Niedersachsen, uniT with the Karl-Franzens university and the university of applied sciences in Graz, Cardet with the university of Nicosia, VIFIN with the university of Copenhagen and CESIE with the university of Palermo. The main activities of the project were the meetings of the consortium with local and regional experts to get to know and to discuss good practice examples. Each partner organized a meeting and experts from universities, NGOs, migrants`communities and adult education organisations. They gave an overview of the situation in their country and region and presented good practice examples of how to support the target group. Each partner also brought in its own expertise -VNB its experiences in qualification, guidance and competence checks, uniT its experience in qualification, guidance and competence checks by using creative methods and arts and especially its project ""Silent University"" which gives migrants and refugees the opportunity to show their competences by taking part in research and teaching projects, VIFIN and Cardet their special expertise in blended and online learning, CESIE its expertise in working with migrants and the special method of Danilo Dolci. Stakeholders on local and regional leves were involved in these activities and meetings, too - as guests or as speechers or by getting the newsletters.The activities lead to different interesting results and impacts - for the partners, cooperating organisations and the stakeholders:- It became clear that the language skills are one of the most important barriers. It takes a certain amount of time to learn a language from the scratch to a level which fulfills the demands of higher education. As the refugees often need to earn money as soon as possible they do not have the time and the ressources to invest enough energy in learning the language up to the requested level.- A lot of refugees do not really know the European systems of education. They especially are not familiar with the higher vocational education because that often does not exist in their home countries. They often do not have an instutionalized higher vocational training - one either goes to university or works as an unskilled worker learning by doing. Proper guidance can sort out useful paths for career planning of the target group by focussing on higher vocational education. These paths may much better match their competences and needs as the offers at the university. - Good designed online-tools for guidance, competence checks and language training are really important and helpful. Also to have the chance to do parts of study programmes in certificated online-courses which may be done in English too.- It is very important to open space for migrants and refugees to show their competences even if it is outside the labour market. This is the main idea of the Silent University. Their people can teach, research and communicate in different languages , adressing different topics. This is very important for the development of self-esteem, motivation and social integration. It also stops the process of dequalification.All the partners and the cooperating organisations will continue working on the above mentioned issues in their daily work with the target groups and will spread the results in their regional political and educational networks. They also will try to devleop a further European project. Integrations takes and needs time, so all relevant organisations should not stop to support this important process by their means."

The art of inclusion project brought together five institutions from different European regions who are working with refugees and migrants in their pedagogical and/or artistic work with different means, in order to develop and exchange about artistic offerings (theatre, photo, film, literature, dance, painting, music etc.) complimentary to regular education and training activities (i.e. language training courses). The aim was to improve the active inclusion of refugees and migrants by providing artistic meet and exchange opportunities with the entire local community on eye level, thus supporting the take-up of the language and culture of the host society and vice versa. The project was addressing adult educators, migrants and refugees, and artists from different areas as well as the respective local societies. During the project, each transnational partner developed one artistic workshop activity which was prepared prior to, and realized during the partner meetings, addressing partner organizations’ representatives as well as local community including refugees and migrants. Documentations of the local events with up to 50 participants each were made commonly by the project partners. The documentations are presented on the project website and have been disseminated through different channels, particularly through means of social media. The participants in the project (mainly educators in adult education and artists working in education context) gained a better knowledge on opportunities to socially include migrants and refugees through combining adult learning with artistic activities, and being enabled to apply to this knowledge at medium and long term. Concerning the participating organisations, a strong and beneficial impact can be considered, most of them relating to an enhanced quality of work and new perspectives in the education work with vulnerable groups. The impact on target groups, namely refugees and migrants, was significant particularly for the participants in the local workshops. The entire project was thoroughly evaluated by master class students from the Brandenburg University of Technology, and the evaluation report was published on EPALE.The second half of the project lifetime was strongly affected by the pandemic, making it impossible to prepare and meet in person for the final transnational meeting and workshop. Above that, local activities of the project partners had to be reduced due to the respective regulations as regards safety and hygiene, mobility and teaching/training opportunities, meaning that working with the target group of refugees and migrants at eye level was partly impossible. Nevertheless, since all previous workshops could be implemented, the documented outcomes provide practice examples on how arts can contribute to motivation and take-up of language, how the local society can be involved into an inclusive approach for cultural and social exchange, and how such events can be planned and realized.