UNISON Bridges to Learning is a partnership between UNISON, WEA (Workers’ Educational Association) and The Open University in the North (OU).  I am employed by WEA to work on the UNISON led partnership and have two staff to deliver the project alongside me. 

Some UNISON branches in our region have seconded ULRs to work on our project and they help deliver the project to their members in workplaces.  We have had over twelve different branches with activists seconded to work on Bridges to Learning since the project began. 

We concentrate on the Health, Social Care and Education sectors but we promote and support learning by all UNISON activists, members, their families and friends.

We have helped thousands of trade unionists access learning opportunities, whether it be English and Maths first level qualifications, accredited vocational qualifications, informal learning, CPD, work experience, university courses or adult apprenticeships.

Our way of working since Covid hit has changed beyond recognition, we are relying much more on getting online to learn – and have learned a lot ourselves about how this process works and its benefits and challenges for our learners.

We have always in our project struggled with getting online. Our IT outcomes have been pitifully low over the years, apart from in one particular workplace, where our project worker, John Wears was able to work closely with the IT team and promote the learning that they offered, starting with basic IT. 

Other than that it was very ad hoc, and quite hit and miss.  We work a lot in the health sector, particularly in NHS Trusts, so it is difficult at times to get the trust of the Trusts, so to speak, that we were actually wanting to deliver and promote useful IT learning such as Safe Use of Social Media or basic IT courses. 

Coupled with the fact that many lower paid and lower grade workers (our members) often do not have work email addresses (or if they do, they do not get the chance to use IT at work) then this was always an uphill struggle.

When lockdown happened and many people were working from home, we realised that we were going to have to embrace online learning in a big way or lose access to members. Lots of organisations started promoting all their online courses and we would send these promotional emails out, but we didn’t feel we had a handle on what was going on or had the opportunity to properly support learner who took up these courses. It was a bit of a scattergun approach.

So we decided to try to bring all the various offers together, everything our partners were doing, into a hub on our website. We found an online provider of qualification bearing English and Maths and we had established links with our partners, WEA, OU and UNISON as well as local distance learning provider Learning Curve, and Skills Network through unionlearn. 

Learners can now access learning from all of those providers in the one place and through registering with the hub, get links to or access to courses in this way.  We can stay in touch with learners and help them along their journeys, finding out how they are getting on.  

Another benefit of this for project management is that the hub can give us access to some of the evidence we need for ULF to show our project is delivering.

We launched it at the end of May and have been staggered by the response, we must have nearly 2000 people contact us to enquire about learning or to find out more and over 1000 active learners.

Our online learning hub took off really quickly and it is great to see the numbers of people keen to access learning and improve their knowledge and skills through accessing the hub, which we have tried to make as attractive and accessible as possible.

However we were also conscious that members still valued classroom based learning and have worked out a solution for that too. Our partner, WEA, had, early on in lockdown, trained all its tutors to deliver learning online, a massive achievement and was ready to go. 

Using online classroom technology, we instigated short taught sessions for members. These courses, around topics such as Stress Management in the Pandemic, Self-empowerment, Employability Skills, Coping with change, Budgeting and Saving, Morning Stretch and Reflexology – struck a chord and we delivered 12 of these during lockdown, have another 12 planned before Christmas and a further 12 for the Spring. 

Learners are getting used to managing the technology but we always have a member of staff present in each workshop to support learners with access and techie issues during the workshops. The challenges are as ever – getting the time off to attend and also issues to do with connectivity and IT skills. It is amazing to see how the IT skills of previously reluctant learners have improved since engaging with UNISON in this way.

Our next steps are to deliver these taught online courses into specific UNISON branches in health trusts, local councils across the region, where we have Bridges to Learning ULR project workers. We will retain our online learning hub into the future as it has provided both a response to Covid for individuals whose jobs are at risk and a lasting learning service for our members

To find out more about the Bridges to Learning online hub go to www.bridgestolearning.org.uk/online-learning/