It's a bit sad to find on my return that the community education debate has not been sorted out giving some favour to those organisations and people that have been keeping education going during the troubles and beyond .
During the troubles many organisations set up in order to give education opportunity's to those who did not feel comfortable linking into the mainstream, after the ceasefires and when peace finds came to Northern Ireland lots of organisations developed innovative ways of reaching out to people and getting them involved with moving their lives forward in a positive way. The the peace finds come to an end what happens to those organisations, are they mainstreamed? do their innovative techniques of education be looked on as an exemplar ? or is the plug pulled ?
Yes you've guessed it, the plug is pulled and all funds are directed to the FE collages which to many people is too far for a first step into education. Apparently the FE collage have got rid of their community education departments but they are still supposed to run community education through tenders . Interesting.
My hope is that some sort of reasoning is found and that organisations and people that have kept the whole community education seen together over the years get a good opportunity to continue the excellent work going on .There are many organisations from overseas that look to N.I and see it as an innovative model, it's just locally that it seems to be ignored.
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