GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

inclusive. You do not particularly have to have qualifications to come to Ruskin

College and study for a degree. We do an excellent piece of work really for the

students that come through our gates.

However, I would have to say Ruskin faces challenging times, like all

institutions. We face the brunt of funding changes, we lost our funding from the

Skills Funding Agency for our degree programmes two or three years ago and

that left a significant hole in what we do. Also belatedly with the diminution of

trade union funding, that has hit us hard as a college. This year went down to

50% from the Skills Funding Agency and it is set to disappear completely from

September onwards, so that sets us a challenge in terms of what we do in

terms of our educational provision and the character of the college. We are

also facing the changes really that are besetting the sector in terms of local

commissioning and so on. At the moment we are nationally funded but we are

under challenge really to maintain that national funding as funding gets, if you

like, concentrated into localities and you have local commissioning between

local skills agencies and that is a particular challenge.

Supporting the movement. We do support the movement broadly. Ruskin

College always has done. We train up to about 2,000 reps a year. That is the

important bit that I was mentioning really in the sense that with the loss of that

funding we have to be more creative in our thinking about how we structure

those programmes and what we do. Also in higher education we offer the MA

in Global Labour and Social Change which will have a new cohort starting in

September this year and we still run the BA Honours in International Labour

and Trade Union Studies, so we are maintaining that position, but it is getting

increasingly difficult to do so and I guess one reason why I thought I would

come and speak to you today was about saying to you all that we do need your

support and the college needs the support of the movement. It needs the

support in terms of thinking about what type of programmes we offer going

forward.

This is the picture of Old Ruskin. This is 1915 or 1914, back in that dim and

distant past. It is quite an interesting picture in the sense that they are

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