The new Junior Minister for adult education, Willie O'Dea, was looking into his crystal ball when he addressed AONTAS's adult learning exhibition in Dublin two weeks ago. His forecasts were dramatic: by the year 2000 some 20 million people in the EU will be unemployed; in 15 years, there will be a two-day working week; in the near future, every person will have to change jobs or professions five or six times during his or her working life; distance learning will become the main tool of adult education, but many people will not be able to afford the new technologies required to gain access to it.
O'Dea has promised the first-ever Green Paper on adult education by Christmas, with a policy White Paper within the next 12 months. He has said this Cinderella sector of the education system lacks organisation and cohesion; its funding is "miniscule" compared to other European countries and the performance of the VECs as the State's main adult education providers is very uneven.
The low priority placed on adult education by successive Ministers for Education and their civil servants was shown by the lack of emphasis on in both the 1995 Education White Paper and in last year's Education Bill. Dr Tom Collins, head of Maynooth's Centre for Adult and Community Education, has criticised the first for its "lack of precision and aspirational nature" and the second for its revelation of the official view that what constitutes education does not include the vital area of adult education.
He says the sector "lacks a comprehensive statutory framework, is seriously underfunded and generally poorly resourced. When funding becomes available, it is invariably of an impermanent and discretionary nature."
However, what depresses Collins most is how little education policymakers have learned from the adult education "revolution" which has been going on, particularly among women and working class communities, for the past 15 years. He believes that they are pioneering a whole new kind of education - student-centred, holistic and geared to the new emphasis on `multiple intelligences.'
AONTAS, the National Association of Adult Education, estimates that in that time about 1,000 groups - bringing together at least 40,000 people, most of them women - have come together to improve their lives and their communities by means of self-help education courses.
This is part of the huge constituency which Mary Robinson recognised when she ran for president. Seven years later the politicians are beginning to realise that the largely EU-inspired slogans of social inclusion and lifelong learning describe something that is actually happening under their noses in many of Ireland's marginalised communities.
It is usually happening in an unstructured, , seriously underfunded manner. Formal adult education has traditionally been the province of the VECs and has been seen largely as an area of interest for middle-class people wanting to expand their leisure pursuits and improve their qualifications through evening classes. Since 1979 there have been specialised adult education officers in every VEC area.
However, since funding has until recently been tiny, it has tended to be a low status, low priority sector. In certain areas such as Dublin, Limerick, Kildare and Offaly, highly-motivated adult education officers (AEOs) backed by supportive VEC sub-committees have managed to promote a wide range of courses. In other areas there has been a lower level of commitment.
The result has been the explosion of daytime, usually women's, courses in personal development, community health and management, community arts and more mainstream subjects. It has been a largely autonomous phenomenon, although it has often been strongly supported by individual AEOs.
Partly in response, a whole new range of actors has appeared on the scene. The lack of enthusiasm of the Department of Education has meant that other government agencies, often spurred on by EU funding, have stepped into the breach (see panel).
Most of the successful new are abased partnerships have education officers, who sometimes have to operate in uneasy proximity with the local VEC. There is considerable duplication as all these agencies target the same disadvantaged communities and compete for the same funding. One hard-working AEO in a rural VEC area estimates that he has to get funding from 12 different sources.
In 1989 the Department of Education started its own successful Vocational Training Opportunities Scheme (VTOS), aimed at bringing the long-term unemployed back into full-time education. VTOS, funded by the European Social Fund, now accounts for over 80 per cent of the Department's adult education budget.
A tiny £3.5 million - 0.16 per cent of total education spending - comes from the Irish Exchequer's own resources.
Then there is the question of literacy. Minister O'Dea, noting that just over £2 million is spent on adult literacy programmes, has said he would be seeking a substantial increase in this figure. However, he warned against "undue expectations," stressing that it was the Department of Finance which would have the final say.
A soon-to-be-published OECD adult literacy survey will show that Ireland has the second worst adult literacy record among eight European and North American countries, ahead only of Poland. It will show that 25 per cent of Irish adults surveyed have problems with deciphering simple instructions on how to take over-the-counter medicines like aspirin. That translates into around half a million people.
Another OECD survey last year showed that 58 per cent of the Irish population - the equivalent of 930,000 people - had left school at or before Junior Cert. Experts at the National Adult Literacy Agency (NALA) wonder how many of these may also have reading, writing and counting difficulties.
There are probably fewer than two dozen full-time literacy workers in the country, all badly paid, with poor working conditions and no career structure. Most people get two hours literacy tuition a week, which means "they will be dead by the time they can read and write," says NALA's acting director, Inez Bailey.
Accreditation is another problem. People doing foundation courses in literacy, numeracy, study skills and personal development desperately need to have their achievements recognised and validated. The National Council for Vocational Awards is in the early stages of putting together a `ladder' of certification which will allow people in `second chance' education to climb from such foundation levels through to PLCs and third-level qualifications.
Many employers are now looking for courses and accreditation which emphasise problem-solving skills and knowledge of the real world. NALA is working with the Waterford Institute of Technology to develop a qualification which will recognise people's experience in working in the community rather than purely academic achievements.
With the exception of Maynooth - and to a lesser extent TCD and UCC - the universities have been slow to respond to the needs of `second chance' adult learners, even though a recent HEA report warned that 20 per cent of third-level students would be adults by 2015. Amazingly, most part-time mature students, even those from disadvantaged backgrounds, still have to pay fees.
