GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

PHIL CARDEW: I am Deputy VC. I look after the academic side at Leeds Beckett

University and have been working closely with our colleague Alan Smith and

the play work team who has been working with Doug on taking the first steps

about making this partnership a little bit more concrete. I will just start one step

back from that and follow up our colleague from the Professional Footballers

Association. We absolutely agree and wholeheartedly endorse the concept of

simply not churning students out into particular pathways and particular

degrees and I think one of the common threads of our education strategy at the

moment is that all our degree subjects, all our education opportunities for

students are about increasing their independence, increasing their confidence

and increasing their ability to actually go out into any work place and add value

to it. There is a hackneyed old statistic that careers advisers trot out that 52%

of jobs that will require a graduate do not tell you what the graduate has to be a

graduate of. It is that sense that graduates actually are people who can

research and think confidently and be critical about their engagement with the

outside world. That is very much at the heart of the training and opportunities

that the GFTU provide.

In practical terms we are trying to do two or three things in taking this

partnership forward. One is to work with Doug and his colleagues about the

training you already offer and to see if we can add some value to it by giving it

credibility in a wider sense of the educational world in terms of higher education

credit. There is again another old hackneyed concept that employers like

training and students like qualifications and I think the more we can do to help

training become a portable qualification, something that will add to other things

or can provide entry routes into other kinds of qualification, other kinds of

training would be really valuable and we are working very closely on that.

The second thread I think really is about the future. What else can we do?

What else is there that the GFTU might want to provide for students,

particularly in a world where funding is increasingly tight and we are being

pushed in different directions for funding, looking at all the various routes and

opportunities out there for students and again how we can widen participation

and provide more opportunities in the workplace and the credit law that

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