Pathways to Adult Education for People with Intellectual Disabilities

For people with intellectual disabilities, life-long learning is not only about learning new skills or vocational training. It is about being included in society, being able to represent oneself and to take more control of one’s daily life and future. However, one of the main barriers for people with intellectual disabilities to access life-long learning programmes is the lack of accessible adult training and information material in easy-to-understand language.

To improve the accessibility of those programmes, the Pathways project’s partners decided to developed European Easy-to-Read standards for adult education and e-learning material in six different languages.

Results

The results of the Pathways project were presented at Inclusion Europe Annual Congress "Europe in Action 2009" in Finland.

The partnership of Pathways produced four different tools during the life-time of the project:

• European standards on how to make information easy to read and understand for people with intellectual disabilities.
  English - German - French - Finnish - Lithuanian - Portuguese
  
• A training program for lifelong learning staff to learn how to write texts easy to read and understand.
  English - German - French - Finnish - Lithuanian - Portuguese

• Guidelines on how to involve people with intellectual disabilities in the writing of texts that are easy to read and understand.
  English - German - French - Finnish - Lithuanian - Portuguese

• A check-list to evaluate the level of easy to read of a text.

In addition, the partnership decided to work on an extra brochure called "Teaching can be easy" providing recommendations for lifelong learning staff on how to make their courses more accessible.
English - German - French - Finnish - Lithuanian - Portuguese