Maribor Adult Education Centre

Proposer: City of Maribor, Boris Sovič, mayor

The Maribor Adult Education Centre is an educational institution with an 85-year tradition. It is no wonder, then, that its activity should have developed in all directions, in terms of both scale and programme content and quality. With a deliberate programmatic involvement in the social environment, taking into account Maribor's development needs, it plays a part in shaping the pulse of the city and its wider hinterland. The Maribor Adult Education Centre is responsible for many innovative education projects. As a focal point of the culture of lifelong learning, it has won recognition both at home and abroad. It offers project learning for young adults, information and counselling in the sphere of adult education, training for a successful life and the promotion of the culture of learning in the framework of the Lifelong Learning Week. It guarantees the quality running of a centre for self-directed learning, study circles and a university of the third age. The Maribor Adult Education Centre is a selected organisation for the external verification of foreign languages and the holder of a Goethe-Institut licence for North Eastern Slovenia. With the boom in higher education it has become a study centre for three higher education institutions. It provides training under the certificate system and is an implementer of the 10,000+ programme for the unemployed. In designing programmes the Maribor Adult Education Centre is able to take into account the needs of all generations and of people with special needs. It takes part in projects co-financed by the European Union and in this way creates valuable international partnerships. It has developed a school for parents and children from immigrant families (from countries outside the EU) as part of the INTI programme, taken part in the School Is Cool and Go-Europe-Go projects and in Mobile Game-Based Learning (development of an innovative learning environment). A particularly successful recent event was a language festival (as part of Socrates-Lingua) which used simple but effective promotional methods to acquaint the whole society with the languages of the new EU Member States. For its media effectiveness the project won five prestigious advertising awards and a place in the final event in Cannes.