1. Tackling 'Skills for life' together - the union perspective
Judith Swift, TUC (04-Dec-03)
This is an adaptation of a speech Judith gave at the 2003 'Workplace Basic Skills Network' conference.

One thing is for sure; effectively tackling workplace 'Skills for Life' needs shared commitment and co-operation from all sides. Provision is particularly effective when unions and employers work together to agree joint messages and joint support and joint action.

Unions have been very successful in reaching and encouraging fellow workers to improve their 'Skills for Life' - whether those are 'rusty skills' or addressing skills which school did not really help with.

Union learning representatives have had a critical role to play. The role of the ULR is to help workers improve their learning; they are an advocate and a facilitator. They have recently (April 2003) received statutory backing to train and carry out their role, giving them the same status as shop stewards or health and safety representatives. So far they have been enormously successful in securing greater workplace learning - there has been a 51.6% rise in learning agreements between employers and union learning reps. The reps are proving particularly effective in:

• finding out what people at work want to learn and what their real needs are
• working with local providers to arrange learning to suit those needs, ensuring learning is contextualised and appropriate
• working with employers to support learning, getting their buy-in and securing commitment

In a recent TUC survey conducted by ULRs 'Skills for life' (literacy, numeracy and ESOL) was identified as the most popular learning need, with 84.7% of workers surveyed saying that they wanted to address these skills. Basic ICT came a close second with 86.6% of respondents siting it.

The ULR role has been very effective in the area of 'Skills for Life' and works best when employers are fully supportive of the learning reps. Employers have been saying things such as:

"We didn't realise that 'Skills for life' was an issue for us until the union explained that often people were struggling with some aspects of what we need them to do. They pointed out that this could be remedied by offering training".

"We did realise that we had issues but did not know how to tackle them without causing problems or offence".

"We know that people can talk to their learning representative without feeling threatened or pressurised. By working together, we can make 'Skills for Life' a legitimate area of learning".

(continued on next page)

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