GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

welcomes at Leeds Beckett University which is a university founded on the

principle of opening access, making sure our people get their rights to higher

education of quality. It is not every day that the trade union movement has a

presentation from a vice chancellor of a university and a deputy vice

chancellor, but that is what we are doing today and we hope we can create a

bit of a dialogue with them, because there are still opportunities out there for

our people and we must start to take them and work closely with colleagues in

HE who share our values and our agenda, so it is an absolute privilege this

morning to introduce Peter Slee and Phil Cardew. Peter is going to speak first

and he is the Vice Chancellor of Leeds Beckett, so a big welcome to Peter.

(Applause)

PETER SLEE: Colleagues, good morning. Thank you so much for inviting Phil

Cardew and I to your conference today and also for the really warm hospitality

that you have shown us both. The reason that we are here is because of the

power of an underlying truth in a single paragraph in this prospectus, Education

for Action, and I will quote from it. It says that trade unionists are all educators,

we seek to persuade, recruit, communicate, inform, convince, negotiate,

present arguments. We learn and teach things all the time to each other,

unions are learning organisations, and it is that learning and that process of

education which underpins the common action GFTU promotes for the

betterment of all people’s working lives.

I work as part of Leeds Beckett University and when I read that paragraph I

understood immediately that we share common cause with you. Our mission is

to ensure that we use our knowledge and resources to make a positive and

decisive difference to people, communities and organisations and when I first

joined our university 18 months ago I spent the first three months simply talking

to people. In the end I talked to over a thousand people and every single one

of them when I asked them why they worked at our university and what they

thought we did that was important said, “We make a difference. We make a

difference to individual people’s lives, we help people make the most of their

talent” and, therefore, I think we do share a common cause with you and I think

we both share a common belief in the transformative power of education. We

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