Project Pathways II

Pathways to Adult Education for People with Intellectual Disabilities and their Families

People with intellectual disabilities often leave school early and do not go on to pursue further education due to discriminatory attitudes and the lack of an adapted curricula and support.

Since most lifelong learning programmes and materials are not accessible, adults with intellectual disabilities are systematically denied the opportunity to continue developing their skills and competences throughout their life.

Besides, exclusion of people with intellectual disabilities from lifelong learning education significantly weakens their chances to compete in the labour market.

The project Pathways II is designed to make sure that people with intellectual disabilities can actively participate in the adult education programmes.

Information for all

In 2009, Inclusion Europe together with partners and self-advocates in Austria, Germany, Finland, France, Ireland, Lithuania, Portugal and Scotland, working together within the framework of a project Pathways I, developed tools to make lifelong learning programs more accessible, namely:

• European standards on how to make information easy to read and understand for people with intellectual disabilities.
• A training program for lifelong learning staff to learn how to write texts easy to read and understand.
• Guidelines on how to involve people with intellectual disabilities in the writing of texts that are easy to read and understand.
• A check-list to evaluate the level of easy to read of a text.  Croatian - English - Hungarian - Italian - Latvian - Slovak - Spanish
  

Making the change happen Europe-wide

Pathways II thus builds on the heritage of the original Pathways project and multiplies its impact, covering almost all the European Union.

The project makes the Pathways materials available to people with intellectual disabilities and adult education staff in other European countries through the involvement of Inclusion Europe's members in Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Italy, Slovenia, Slovakia and Spain in the project partnership.

In order to ensure that more people with intellectual disabilities have access to lifelong learning programmes in a larger number of European countries, a particularly strong emphasis is put on the dissemination. As a result, a number of national-level training events will be held in each of the country.

Similarly, the project actively targets education providers and decision-makers to achieve concrete action in the area of education to improve the accessibility of lifelong learning programmes for adults with intellectual disabilities.

More information about the Project Pathways can be found at www.life-long-learning.eu.

 

Implementation period	2011 - 2013
Funded by	European Commission, Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency under the Lifelong Learning Programme, Key Activity 4
Project number	519328-LLP-1-2011-1-BE-KA4-KA4MP
Project coordinator	Inclusion Europe
Project partners	Association for Self-Advocacy (Croatia) SPMP (Czech Republic) EVPIT (Estonia) ÉFOÉSZ (Hungary) Anffas, (Italy) Rupju Berns (Latvia) Zveza Sožitje (Slovenia) ZPMPvSR (Slovakia) FEAPS (Spain)

With the support of the Lifelong Learning Programme of the European Union