In 2006, the Spanish Women’s Institute carried out a study on immigrant women and adult education, with the intention of allowing these women to have a right to speak. The results and conclusions of this study were published as part of the “Women in Education” collection.

This article doesn’t intend to sum-up the principal conclusions of the study or to name them all. Instead it simply aims at emphasising the proposals for improvement suggested by these immigrant women and by professionals in adult education.

The proposals were as follows:

• Concentrate immediately on language tuition. It makes no sense to have a training curriculum, unless the immigrant participants already possess appropriate language skills. Offer more language tuition as a prioritised issue.

• Develop parallel support programmes that facilitate the combination of education and family life (taking care of infants). Traditional educational systems (shifts, timetables, adapted contents and so on) do not suffice in order to overcome the barriers associated with education.

• Develop intense language courses. These women can’t afford the time to spend months training in order to achieve the skill level they require. In this case, they demand conversation courses, as well as the everyday courses.

• Combine language tuition with a cultural background.

• Arrange the validation of their qualifications and certificates.

• Demand more experienced teachers and educational resources. In these classrooms, it is now possible to find immigrant women whose education and knowledge exceeds that of their teachers’.

• These learning centres should include a person, or team, in charge of mediation that offers support and advice (legal, health, etc.) outside of the educational scope. The personal circumstances of these immigrant women affect and interfere with the educational process, and in most cases teachers do not know how to respond to this.

• These centres need to be in touch with, and collaborate with other institutions and social agencies in their region.

• Immigrant women should be able to count on the education centres to have places where they can meet and interact outside of the scheduled classes. This would allow these women to talk about and share their feelings of loneliness, isolation and lack of personal contact, which is so common in these situations.

• Modify the advertising mechanisms which are currently being used, because they are obviously not the most efficient ones. The campaigns would be more efficient if they would focus on education centres where the immigrant’s children are also able to attend, or on the arrangement of discussions about basic topics of interest for these women, such as nutrition, infant health, paediatrics, gynaecology and family planning.

These proposals can realistically be summarised in three parts:
• The importance of language tuition.
• The necessity for additional support programmes, and the required modifications within the adult educational system that go beyond merely adapting the training curriculum and educational organisation.
• The concept of an adult education as a global process of learning that consists of more than just obtaining qualifications and professional skills.