The Community Foundation for Ireland, on behalf of the Beachaire Fund, a private charitable donor fund at the Community Foundation for Ireland, is inviting tenders for a research project on community education’s role in supporting lone parents in Ireland facing educational and social disadvantage.
Tender application details can be found here.
It is expected that the research findings will provide the basis for actionable recommendations for policymakers that are both aligned with Ireland’s national strategy for further education and training and which are grounded in findings from this scientific research.
Community education and lone parents
The main focus of this project is to research the role played by the community education sector in providing educational opportunities to lone parents in Ireland. This sector has been to the fore in the provision of community-based education programmes to lone parents of young children (the majority of whom are mothers) facing social and economic disadvantage.
Research focus
The objective is to explore the impact of these education programmes on women’s lives as educational participants, from their perspective as learners who are also mothers. It includes both in-depth case study analysis of selected courses and a longitudinal study of student mothers (capturing learner feedback from participation in programmes at the point of beginning, during and completing the programme in the period spanning September 2021 to September 2022).
The research will lead to a better understanding of the benefits that participating in community education can provide to lone parents. It will also explore whether such benefits help to promote and foster improved educational participation and outcomes by their children.
It is also hoped that the research will identify programmes which have had particularly positive benefits for participants that could be replicated across other programmes and feed into Ireland’s national strategic objective of developing best practice within a national Community Education Framework.
The due date for Tender responses is Friday 23 July 2021 at 12 pm (noon). Tender application details can be found here.