Writing by Dr Kate Smyth, Strategic Communications Officer
This year we saw a new part-time fee scheme was brought in for undergraduate college courses, which has long been a goal of our advocacy work – see this piece in the Irish Times showing former CEO Berni Brady calling for this in 2005.
This is an important step, but such support and flexibility should also be extended to further education and training (FET) and adult education.
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We continue to be committed to making Learner Voice a central part of policymaking in Ireland.
Building on previous success, the Department of Further and Higher Education invited us again this year to facilitate twenty learners to speak at an event on the cost of education in April.
This linked with our “Who Does It Cost?” policy discussion as part of the Adult Learners’ Festival, and was central to the development of our Holding You Back campaign.
In terms of public engagement and raising awareness of adult learning, our total reach across media campaigns was a whopping almost 100 million readers and listeners for 2024.
This year’s theme was “Everyday Learning Spaces”, with the hashtag #FindYourselfHere. The idea was to recognise how adult learning happens in community spaces across the country as well as in classrooms. People learn in libraries, digital hubs, learning pods, or learning facilitated in parks or social spaces where people can sit together, eat, and share ideas.
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Groups and organisations held a fantastic 166 events all across the island of Ireland over the course of the week. The AONTAS team joined several Festival events, including one on music held by Dublin Adult Literacy Centre (DALC), one on Dublin history held by Henrietta Adult and Community Education (HACE), and one in the MOLI Museum, which you can read more about here. Find out more about the Festival.
The AONTAS STAR Awards was a roaring success this year, held in Croke Park in Dublin and hosted by comedian and writer PJ Gallagher, with entertainment from the Dublin Ukulele Collective. This year, there were 24 fantastic shortlisted initiatives, and on Friday 8th March we announced 7 winners. The overall media reach of the Festival and STAR Awards was 10 million readers and listeners. Read more about this year’s awards and the winners here.
As part of the Festival, we held a policy discussion, “Who Does It Cost? How greater investment in adult learners will strengthen Irish society”, exploring policy solutions to the growing levels of poverty and income inequality for adult learners. This event was part of our policy change campaign, culminating in the Holding You Back campaign in September. It was the first event of the Adult Learners’ Festival, held in the Richmond Centre in Dublin, and brought together members, learners, and policymakers. Ahead of the event, we put together a discussion paper with our research and policy asks. 80 people joined us on the day. We also wrote a policy brief, which we used on the day and in follow-up conversations with policymakers. Read more about Who Does It Cost here.
As a result of the findings from the Who Does It Cost? Event, Dearbháil was featured in the Journal, writing about the need for greater investment in adult learning in order to achieve equality in our society.
Throughout the year, we prioritised the issue of the barriers to adult and community education for people across the country and, given the cost-of-living crisis and the housing crisis, we focused primarily on the financial barriers. This culminated in our public awareness-raising Holding You Back campaign, which we planned throughout the year and held in September.
Our research found that 41% of people participating in adult education are struggling to pay for household bills and meals. The campaign featured learner ambassadors including Eilish Dunne, who was featured speaking about the campaign on the RTÉ News, Today FM, and in the Irish Independent.
We also featured in the “Future of Education” report, published by the Irish Independent, focussing on the high cost of education in Ireland and how almost 1 in 3 people surveyed said they need more financial support to engage in adult learning.
Our campaign spokesperson was poet, actor, and writer Emmet Kirwan, who spoke passionately about the impact of adult and community education at our campaign mural, designed by artist Emmalene Blake. An interview with Emmet featured in Hot Press magazine. Read the interview here.
Between interviews with Dearbháil and other members of the team, the campaign reached over 70 million readers and listeners across the island of Ireland.
Take a look back at the highlights from the campaign.
Read Dearbháil’s reflections on the campaign here.
This year marked a new direction for AONTAS as we moved more into the campaigning space, becoming more outspoken about policy issues affecting our members and those working and learning through adult and community education.
This is driven by the increasing number of crises affecting our sector, including the cost-of-living and the forced closures of essential groups and services – particularly in community education where ringfenced funding is so badly needed.
As well as the crushing homelessness crisis and rising community tensions related to increasing immigration, disinformation online, and racist and far-right thinking which is impacting adult learning environments across the country, there are also ongoing urgent issues relating to the lack of public services, including childcare and public transport, which are significant barriers to people returning to or staying in education.
We developed a pre-budget submission and met with senior civil servants from the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation, and Science, to discuss the issues directly.
This culminated in our Manifesto for Change, which we launched in Leinster House with the support of Mairéad Farrell TD from Sinn Féin. The manifesto outlines five “transformative changes” and four “quick wins” for policymakers to make it easier and more realistic for people to engage in lifelong learning. Take a look back at the launch here.
Connected with this work, and with the two elections we had this year, we also published two election guides for those working in adult and community education. The goal of these guides was to make it easier for staff to share information with learners. Read the Local and EU Election Guide and the General Election Guide.
We also provided an analysis of what the Budget held for the adult and community education sector, as well as a number of submissions for consideration in new policy directions and changes relevant to our work. 
Over the past couple of years, we have been working with colleagues in the North to strengthen networks in adult and community education. There is a strong Community and Voluntary Sector in the North, but there is a lack of resourcing and funding. We have been working to offer information and data in order to help groups advocate for the need for increased funding. We’ve been working with NICVA, the Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action, and Dearbháil has been engaged with meetings with the Department for the Economy and policymakers related to adult learning.
We have a new research project, which will be delivered in 2025, on the impact of non-formal learning in the North, in collaboration with FALNI (the Forum for Adult Learning NI) and the Lifelong Learning Alliance. Funding for the project is through the Department for the Economy. Read more about this project here.
Linked with our advocacy and political engagement activities, we have been doing a lot of work in raising awareness of the importance of democracy and active citizenship, and in combatting the rise in racism and anti-migrant sentiments in our society.
This includes working with our members on projects to increase voter turnout and sharing the resources we gained through our work with European colleagues with the adult and community education sector. This work was supported through our Learners As Leaders programme.
We held a two-day residential Voter Education Programme in February in partnership with DALC, a really unique programme with training exclusively for Community Education Network members. 13 members joined us for the training. Those groups then held training with their own learners, reaching over 150 people. Read more here.
We also have a new project, Community Education Against Disinformation, which focuses on supporting adult and community education practitioners to promote solidarity and inclusion for diverse communities living side-by-side in Ireland. This project will result in a workbook that can be used by educators in classrooms, with activities to help learners navigate disinformation on social media and think critically about racist, anti-migrant, or far-right messaging, and how to build more awareness and resilience to it. This project will come to fruition next year. Read more about the work so far here.
An essential part of our work this year has been the CEN. We have made 17 visits to CEN members around the country. You can read about them on our blog. We have brought members of the CEN abroad on KA1 learning mobilities. We have held three workshops on “Storytelling for Connecting Communities”, funded by the New European Agenda for Adult Learning (NEAAL), culminating in a handbook that is now freely available on our website. 36 people joined us for these workshops, from 28 different organisations. 
We at AONTAS are committed to the “just, green transition”, which refers to shifting to a sustainable, low-carbon economy in a way that is fair and inclusive. It means addressing climate change while ensuring that all communities, including the most vulnerable, have equal opportunities. Climate change will impact vulnerable populations more acutely. Our project, A Greener Tomorrow through Community Education, facilitates this. In partnership with Saolta, we supported 6 of our CEN members to create sustainability projects, which will help them promote just green transitions with adult learners. Find out more here.
This year, we continued to work with our colleagues in adult learning across Europe to strengthen ties and further opportunities for our members to connect with and learn from organisations in our sector across the EU. We redeveloped our European projects webpage and we were part of 9 EU-funded projects. There are many examples on our blog, but here is one on the Enhance project and a visit to the Netherlands as part of this Erasmus+ project on Learner Voice. Read more.
We conduct robust, evidence-based research into adult education, community education, and Further Education and Training (FET). We mainly do this through the National FET Learner Forum and research into community education in Ireland.
The National FET Learner Forum is a series of events taking place across Ireland, which facilitate adult learners to share their experiences of learning. This is the basis of our advocacy work and is used to ensure further education and training policy is responding to the needs of the learners themselves. We had 9 forum events around Ireland, which eventually led to the publication of our research reports. This research underpins our advocacy work. This year, there were 1,716 Learner Voice contributions to the 2023-24 Forum.
Impressively, 99.9% of participants consider their Forum experience to be a positive one.
Our key publication of the year was our Learner Voices Across Ireland report, launched in October in Athlone. The report found that 64% of people surveyed gained more self-confidence through engaging in adult learning in Ireland in the last year. We were invited to speak about the report on Near FM. Read more about the main findings here.
A major research publication of this year was “The first thing is a listening ear: The transformative impact of the Dillon’s Cross Project.” This project, from Cork Education and Training Board, focused on providing educational support to female relatives of prisoners and ex-prisoners. We interviewed five learners and three service providers. This report demonstrates the impact of this project for those learners, and provides an evidence base for future advocacy work. Read the report here.
We publish stories directly from adult learners from across the country, sharing the benefits and impact of adult and community education on their lives. We published 10 stories this year. Read our learner stories here.
We have been offering training to learners and staff with Education and Training Boards around the country, on how to embed Learner Voice processes into education structures and systems. This year, we conducted the training with four ETBs. Find out more about our Learner Voice Training.
The Adult Learner is Ireland’s leading peer-reviewed academic journal for adult and community education. This year, we had our first in-person launch since before the COVID-19 pandemic, and 40 people joined us at the National College of Ireland for it. We had a keynote from Dr Audrey Bryan and a dedication to Board member Luke Murtagh, who sadly passed away this year. Find out more about the journal and read the latest edition here. 
We collaborate with and advocate on behalf of our members on a constant basis. We sent 24 emails to members this year. We went on 25 member visits. These visits have resulted in some fantastic interviews, including this example about DCU as an age-friendly university.
We continue to engage with our members online and in person, through visits, calls, our website, and our social media.
A new membership hub, currently in development, will be a new and imaginative space for our members to connect, and to gain brand-new resources exclusive to members. More on this in 2025.
In May, we held our AGM and over 80 people joined us at the Spencer Hotel in Dublin. Dearbháil presented our new Strategic Plan, Leading Collective Action for Social Change and our decision to move to a “much stronger advocacy approach”. The AGM, entitled “What's Holding Us Back? Moving Forward with Tackling Barriers to Adult Education”, was a precursor to our Holding You Back campaign, which we were planning at the time. Find out more about the AGM here and take a look at our Annual Report for 2023 here.
Next year holds some exciting new activities and developments for AONTAS, our members, and those in the adult and community education sector. This includes our Adult Learners’ Festival, which will focus on “Connecting Communities”, a new public awareness-raising campaign, another adult education Summit, more robust and evidence-based research, and plenty of engagement with our members, the CEN, and our European partners.
We will have a new Government and will work to promote the impact and benefits of adult and community education with the new Minister for Further and Higher Education. We will continue to advocate for empowering adult learning that drives social equality, justice, and collective action across the island of Ireland.
We look forward to working with you in 2025. For now, we wish you and yours a merry Christmas, and a very happy New Year.