GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

commercial rates at commercial hotels to host our education events and that

has meant that a lot of our money has gone outside the movement to

nonunionised hotels. We are now pleased that we have got a home to keep the

money in the movement. We do not just provide courses. We do lots of other

things. We manage the education programmes for some unions. We act as

their administrative arm for running their education. We have been at the

forefront really of thinking philosophically about the nature of trade union

education and you will be aware of the book that we published last year called

Trade Union Education Transforming the World which has had a reflection on

the way trade union education has gone post-War and then a reflection on

where it could go and it has been seeking to introduce new concepts, new

ways of learning into our sector and it is good that Mike Seal, the editor of that

book, is with us today from Newman University and hopefully he will be able to

say something in this debate.

Unions are doing new things with their own education. Some unions have now

said, “You cannot be a trade union representative for this union unless you do

mandatory training”, so every single representative, whether they have been

doing it for 10 days or 10 years or 20 years, has got to go through new training

to make sure they are up to date with the organising agenda in particular and

some unions have said that all of their staff, whether in admin or frontline

officers in the field, have got to do organising training and reps training so that

they are aware of all the issues involved for members. So that has meant that

a lot of unions have developed their own training. The GFTU is trying to

support those developments and part of that support has been to offer a new

course for training trainers, because the other development in a number of

unions is that they are asking their own members who have got a flare for

communications and training to train other members and the role that we are

trying to help with is to get them the best possible training to be trainers that we

possibly can and, again, Mike and some of the other colleagues might want to

come in on the work that we have done on that.

One of the big really important new developments is trade union officials

apprenticeship. We are defining the job of a trade union official and

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