Financing Workshop Brussels, 27 February 2015

Why this workshop? Feedback from our members (country reports): – As in many other countries, survey respondents from Austria predict the need to further show why adult education is such a vital part of future democratic societies. And as always, funding remains key. For Austria, the situation beyond 2015 is still in the air. – Moreover, the financial support of the European Commission is very important, as the national financial crisis has reduced all the resources to be invested in adult education. (Croatia) – Funding from EU programmes remains crucial and it is important for adult education providers in Cyprus to know and understand the proceedings surrounding such grants. The domestic funding situation is unlikely to change anytime soon.

Why this workshop? At the moment, adult education in Finland is experiencing financial challenges. EAEA members inform us that the current government grant will be reduced by 20% over the upcoming two years. Funding for adult education is an on-going issue, and although the EU has found solutions to tackle the financial crisis adult education remains low on the list of priorities.

Feedback from membership survey All of the respondents said that this was a very important topic for them in general. 86% of the participants stated that financing was an important topic in their respective country, and when asked about the key issue(s) for financing adult education in their organisations/regions/countries, over three quarters of the participants named the low amount of money as the main difficulty. The organisations’ main sources of income are for most of the members governmental funding and membership fees. To a lesser extent, training fees, consultancy fees, municipal funding, and ESF funding were named as important sources of income.

Feedback continued 41% of the respondents said that there have been recent changes in the financing of adult education in their countries. For some of the participants, these changes were for the worse, and they named a general cut of state subsidies for adult education and a move to loan financing from grants financing as the main reasons for that dynamic. Some participants also said that their governments shifted money from general adult education to vocational education and training for the labour market. Some states suffer from a crisis in general and therefore do not have money for publicly funded education anymore. Although the financing of adult education is usually a responsibility of the governments, 86% of the respondents think that it is very important for EAEA to work on the financing of adult education.

What do our members recommend that we do? Some of the respondents stated that EAEA should collect experience and analyse national priorities as well as provide research on financing of adult education in EU countries. One respondent said that “the experience from Grundtvig is that there are a lot of countries that would not have any adult education without EU funding. The EC should clearly be aware that the existence of strong adult education NGOs is for a lot of European countries still a myth.” Another respondent suggested that EAEA should “organise regional debates on the issue, and make use of surveys on the issue, like the EC Survey on financing adult learning in 2012.”

THANK YOU!