Report by the RECOVEU Consortium. RECOVEU: A participative approach to curriculum development for adults in addiction recovery across the European Union. Report for Deliverable 4.4: Focus Group Overview. EU Lifelong Learning Project. Project No. 538955-LLP-1-2013-UK-GRUNDTVIG-GMP.

Work Package 4 – Focus Group Phase has supported an understanding of the part played by adult education in an individual’s recovery process and provides a way in which people in recovery could be supported to engage in adult education opportunities. The aim of this specific WP was to obtain feedback from service users and providers on what they require from an Access to Learning course and identify key aspects for developing such a course.

The Objectives were:

1. To develop the Focus Group Plan to provide guidelines for organising and delivering the
research by each partner involving service users and service providers/trainers (i.e.
practitioners working in the field of drug recovery/education who are directly involved with
delivering learning related activities to the target group).

2. Each partner to hold a series of focus groups for services users and service
providers/trainers to identify barriers and enablers to participation in learning.

3. Collect and summarise the focus group data to produce a Focus Group Overview.

The main criterion for inclusion of service users was to target adults in recovery who are capable of moving towards Higher Education. Some of the partners had direct access to potential adult learners in the target group, and their own workers/trainers both participated in the focus groups and set the parameters for which service users to target.