EBSN 2021 Annual Conference

The European Basic Skills Network, EBSN (https://basicskills.eu/), is an association of policy level stakeholders engaged in basic skills training for adults.  EBSN, like the Erasmus+ Check-in Take-Off (CITO) project, is actively responding to the European Council’s recommendation on Upskilling Pathways, of which basic skills are a core element.  EBSN’s main target group are policy-makers in the adult learning sector at local, regional and national level, as well as those working in European institutions that are active in the field.

On the 28th and 29th October 2021, in Valletta, Malta, the EBSN held their 2021 Annual Conference, ‘Innovation for Resilience – New Approaches to Basic Skills Provision in the Post-COVID Era’. For the first time the EBSN conference was organised in a hybrid form offering involvement and interactivity for both in-person and online participants. There were 47 in-person attendees and 29 online participants, from 22 European countries. The conference speakers were from Europe, Britain and the US.

As part of the plenary presentations on the second day, Ailis Mardon-Egan (National Adult Literacy Agency (NALA), Ireland), Helen Murphy and Sarah Bates-Evoy (Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT), Ireland) presented on the Innovative use of technology as a motivational tool for adults with basic skills needs. This presentation gave the CITO project team the opportunity to showcase the project’s ongoing research and development activities, including: 

  1. An overview of the European context in relation to self-assessment skills audit tools for adults with unmet literacy, numeracy, and digital needs.   
  2. The need for, and subsequent development of, the CITO Skills Checker. 
  3.  A live demonstration of the CITO Skills Checker. 
  4. An overview of the CITO research process. 
  5. The impact of COVID on the testing of the CITO Skills Checker and on the original research plan. 
  6. An overview of how, in a post-COVID era, the CITO Skills Checker can be used and adapted in other European countries and across the wider adult education sector. 

In addition, the CITO project team manned a stand at the conference’s marketplace, which gave attendees the opportunity to discuss the project in more detail and try out the CITO Skills Checker for themselves.  

You can now download the presentation or watch the conference video recording. For more information on the CITO project or to discuss how you can get involved with the project, please get in touch with our project team at [email protected].