GFTU Education in Action 2017 -2018

INTRODUCTION

The GFTU Educational Trust is pleased to offer its most extensive programme since our formation in 1971.

We have listened to affiliates and their education officers and acted upon their ideas for improvements, and carefully considered the evaluations of our course participants and reviewed our whole approach. We have also learned from international experiences. What is discussed in trade union education is vital to the health of our country and the 26

How those discussions take place is equally important so we are introducing new courses to assist trade union educators, that is all of us, in delivering more effective learning. As we all recognise a good educator can change our lives for ever. And education is not about the passing on of information alone, it is about inspiration and imagination, instilling commitment and understanding. We are introducing day-schools, and many of these will cover the seriously neglected subject of our history. We offer a free day’s training to every affiliate in addition to this programme and we manage the entire education programme for others. We have improved our pioneering Trade Union Management programme aimed at developing those who want to play a greater role in managing their unions using the latest thinking in leadership and management issues. We offer regular fora for Continuous Professional Development for specialist union officers to swap notes and learn from outside speakers. Following the great success of our inter-union conference for unions in February 2018. Our annual Youth Festival goes from strength to strength and early bookings for both you will see advertised here are recommended. We have commissioned two education activities that can be toured among the unions: Our History, Our Future is a great performance piece of 75 minutes looking at the history of the trade union movement in pictures, summit in 2015 and our union building conference in 2016 we have a major

“Education is the most powerful weapon we can use to change the world” Nelson Mandela, 2003.

“We want to see the necessary economic knowledge imparted in our labour organisations, so that labour in the future shall not be made the shuttlecock of political parties. Our Trade Unions shall be centres of enlightenment and not merely the meeting place for paying contributions and receiving donations…our ideal is a co operative commonwealth.” Tom Mann and Ben Tillett, The ‘New’ Trade Unionism, 1890.

million workers that work here.

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