RONE - Rise of Non-formal Education

In the 1990s, the Council of Europe started to adopt non-formal education in the youth sector.

The European Commission has also encouraged the implementation of non-formal education in the international mobility projects it carries out within the scope of youth programs, and has made great efforts for youth workers working in this field to gain knowledge and skills. In this context, it has developed a portal called SALTO-Youth, which offers non-formal learning resources for youth workers and youth leaders. Within this portal, there are different non-formal education methods in various fields that youth workers can use. These resources consist of methods developed by qualified trainers and teams working in the field of non-formal education. The Commission encourages more young people and youth workers to use these methods and then develop their own methods by gaining qualifications.

According to the data of the European Statistical Office, the rate of participation in lifelong learning through non-formal education methods has not been reached, which is the EU's 2020 target of 15 percent, and efforts are underway to achieve this target for 2023.

Contrary to most other OECD countries, women are less likely to participate in adult learning than men in Germany. 53% of women in Germany participated in formal and/or non-formal education and training in 2018. This was higher than the OECD average of 48% for women, but lower than the participation rate of men in Germany (59%).

Annual public expenditure on primary to tertiary education per full-time student is above average in Germany, but the share of national wealth devoted to educational institutions is lower than average among OECD countries. In 2018, Germany spent 4.3% of its GDP on primary to tertiary education institutions, compared to 4.9% on average in the OECD.

With the corona epidemic, which has affected the whole world, face-to-face education activities have been stopped all over the world and the distance online education model has started. However, since many educational institutions and trainers did not have any preparations for distance education before, there were problems in how to apply/transfer the existing content, especially the preparation of the subject content.

The problem of preparing and applying content online is also experienced in non-formal education-oriented activities. In this new period, many projects and training activities were canceled or postponed because they could not be carried out remotely. In the new world order with the pandemic, it is of great importance to integrate and implement non-formal education with distance education, and to reveal new educational content that can be applied remotely. 

From this point of view, the project of The Rise of Non-Formal Education aims that youth workers develop new non-formal education methods that also support understandable and applicable distance education on increasing the quality of youth work, while at the same time gaining new knowledge and skills and gaining more qualifications in this field. In addition, increasing our country's participation rate in lifelong learning and developing non-formal education activities within the scope of our 2023 Education Vision are among our project objectives.

In line with this purpose, our goals are:

• Developing new methods suitable for 45 different distance education in 3 titles: Intercultural Learning, Volunteering and European Citizenship, Social Inclusion and Active Participation of Youth (There will be a total of 15 methods under each title. 5 meeting games/moving, 5 workshops, 5 evaluations.)

• To collect these developed methods in a booklet called “The Rise of Non-Formal Education Method Book” and to prepare the booklet in 11 different languages, as well as to establish a German and English website specific to the project where these booklets will be published.

• To ensure that these methods are used by at least 250 youth trainers within 1 year

• Publishing resources on SALTO-Youth

• To increase the capacity of youth workers in Europe and in our country, thereby increasing the quality of youth work

• To ensure the realization of non-formal education activities that were canceled or postponed due to the corona epidemic.

• To enable the young people of our country with limited opportunities to reach, understand and apply different non-formal education methods in German. Disseminating Erasmus+, European Commission, JUGEND für Europa logos in all project outputs