2005 Structural Analysis of Austrian Adult Education Centres. A long-run analysis

Introduction The 2005 Structural Analysis is the fifth survey of the structure of adult education centres in Austria, which is carried out by the Educational Work and Research Unit (PAF) of the Association of Austrian Adult Education Centres (VÖV) every five years. Starting from the first survey in 1985, the development can now be shown over a period of 20 years. These regular structural surveys and their analysis are the only ones of their kind in Austrian continuing education, particularly with regard to their long-term aspect. The analysis is again based on the information of the provincial adult education centre associations, for whose extensive data collection we are very grateful. Non-profit adult education as a whole has undergone clear structural changes in the last five years. More and more private, domestic and international providers have emerged as committed competitors on the Austrian education market. New national insurance regulations and tighter terms and conditions for the use of classroom space have led to a substantial increase in material and administrative costs. (At present Austrian adult education centres pay around 900,000 Euro just for leasing classrooms.) Simultaneous cutbacks in public funding at the federal, provincial and municipal level have thus prompted many institutions to focus their educational work on marketable offers and to focus more on the self-financing of the day-to-day operation by higher contributions on the part of participants. Important educational policy concerns in adult education have increasingly only been financeable and thus feasible if they coincided with EU funding focuses and could be financed through EU projects. It can be assumed that this development will continue in the next few years and the EU educational budget for the development of adult education will be particularly important in the future. Thus adult education centres have been required to reconcile the participants’ increasing quality expectations and the heightened presence of competitors with ever scarcer resources. The consequences have ranged from cutbacks to the closing down or merging of smaller adult education centres into larger ones. The present study shows that the number of adult education centres (272) has declined for the first time in 20 years and has even clearly fallen below the number of adult education centres in 1995 (286). While the percentage of very small adult education centres that offer up to 30 courses was still 40.5 percent in 1995, now only 32.7 percent of adult education centres hold 30 courses or less a year. The merging of very small adult education centres into larger ones can also be interpreted as a structural improvement of the adult education centre sector. The collection of the structural data for 2005 took place in cooperation with the ESF project “Knowledgebase Erwachsenenbildung“ (Knowledge Base Adult Education), whose responsible body is the Association of Adult Education Centres (VÖV). “Knowledgebase Erwachsenenbildung” has been working on developing an internationally oriented virtual educational environment with user friendly databases. Both the current structural data as well as the data of the last two structural surveys in 1995 and 2000 have now been collected and edited in these databases. Therefore, for the first time, only the data evaluation will be published this year, which means that the data collected has been analysed, aggregated for each province and displayed in the usual form. Detailed information on the individual adult education centres can be found on the homepage of Knowledgebase Erwachsenenbildung at www.adulteducation.at. The exact page is indicated for the survey data of each provincial association.