Further information

Evaluations and Statistics Reports of the Austrian Conference on Adult Education

The Austrian Conference on Adult Education strives to enhance the quality and expand the quantity of its statistical performance reports. The data is gathered to document the performances of the adult education institutions. However, because of the different focuses in content and last, but not least, due to the inhomogeneous institutional structures, it is difficult to come up with comparable statistics on adult education.

Starting with the 23rd statistics report, important additional key figures have been collected by categorizing the courses according to individual subject areas. Not every institution has had the possibility yet of categorizing their own work into comparable program areas. Categorization should be further enhanced and thus provide more useful information in future statistics reports. The objective is to obtain a better picture on the statistically recordable performances of adult education in Austria.

Data on other issues, such as the social background and age of participants, will be collected in separate socio-scientific surveys every couple of years. Although this procedure has the disadvantage that the development of certain key figures over time cannot be compared, it also provides the possibility of dealing with current problems and issues concerning the future development of adult education. This mix of approaches should turn statistical surveys, which are often seen as a burden, into a useful service both for adult education institutions and for national adult education policies.