The Adult Education Guidance Services ‘Adult Guidance Management System’ was developed by NCGE from 2004 to 2013, on behalf of the (then) Department of Education and Science. The system was developed to ensure accurate national data-gathering on the provision of guidance services in the (then) pilot projects of the Adult Educational Guidance Initiative (AEGI). Since 2013, SOLAS has funded the continued NCGE management and co-ordination of the AGMS to gather data on the provision of the Adult Educational Guidance Services (AEGS) within the 16 ETBs nationally.
In 2019, the National Centre for Guidance in Education (NCGE) established a stakeholder working group to examine the potential developments and future planning of the Adult Guidance Management System (AGMS) for the wider guidance service provision across the Further Education and Training (FET) sector within the 16 Education and Training Boards (ETBs) nationally. An example of significant developments was following the establishment of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Ireland Data Protection Act, 2018 all current and future data gathering systems would be required to ensure compliance with GDPR. To inform the planning of GDPR compliant future data gathering and to provide a final report of all the data within the current AGMS, NCGE commissioned this overarching report to explore, consider and analyse the quantitative and qualitative data gathered from 2004 to 2018. The quantitative and qualitative data involves both non-personal client statistical data and service reports generated by 39 (ETB) AEGS nationally over those 14 years.
The main objectives of this overarching research report are to:
- generate an overarching overview report of the quantitative and qualitative data gathered on the Adult Educational Guidance Initiative (AEGI) – Adult Educational Guidance Service (AEGS) AGMS database from 2004-2018
- include a report on the documented Case Studies provided as required within the AGMS since 2013
In relation to the scope of this research, NCGE emphasises that it does not provide an ‘evaluation’ of the (ETB) Adult Educational Guidance Services nationally, nor does it provide an evaluation of the AGMS. However, the research will inform the final completion, close-off and archiving of the NCGE AGMS system. This research may also inform developments and data-gathering in any future FET Guidance Management System.
