Jane Eyre works at Blackpool Victoria Hospital, for Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and is currently seconded as Lead Learning Rep and Branch Administrator for Blackpool Health Branch.

Along with colleagues, Bev Herring and Danielle Perrett, they have been actively promoting learning at work since January 2015 but when Jane was seconded at the end of September 2015, they really started doing more. 

The ULRs have been organising a wide range of learning opportunities, as Jane explains:

We are one of the first Trusts/Union to partnership together and roll out the National Numeracy Challenge. We have arranged courses for IT skills, sign language, photography, flower arranging. We are involved in a new project with the Trust to try and engage staff better with appraisals and make their workplace a better place to work. 

We are involved in the Reading Ahead initiative in partnership with the Trust’s library. We won an author in the workplace prize draw, but are not sure who it will be yet. We organised the Learning at Work week activities in partnership with the Trust, including our flashmob which had around 5,000 views on Facebook."

In July the union was involved in a Workforce Showcase Event, which are held quarterly and showcase to staff what the Trust has to offer in the way of benefits, assistance and what different departments do.

UNISON ULRs took the opportunity to focus on the National Numeracy Paper Screening. They had been doing a lot of IT screenings and were coming to the end of their National Numeracy review, but quite a few staff do not have access to a computer so the team have been doing some quick screening on paper to give them a idea of people’s varying levels.

This proved a good opportunity to promote maths to staff as Jane explains further:

We have had in total over 100 people complete the paper screener and hopefully will get a few more before we finish on around the 5th August. We sent out the National Numeracy survey to certain sectors of staff, and the response rate has been about 10%. 

National Numeracy are coming up in October to feedback their findings from the survey and make recommendations. The Trust are putting on a maths GCSE course in September and around 25 people are attending. We will have to wait to see what National Numeracy recommend."

Being a union event there was an opportunity for a prize or two for people completing the screener, in this case a “moneybox pig” and according to Jane:

It's a little purple pig with our logo on it and phone number - It’s very cute! People were interested in doing the screener but whether that was because we bribed them with the pig I don’t know!"

The event was the last time that the ULRs will be holding a paper screening activity, as the idea is for people to do it online from now on, with support from the team. But Jane would recommend it to workplaces that have a lot of staff without access to a PC as it’s a very good way to engage people around maths.

They were also very pleased with how helpful the employer has been. 

Jane added:

The Trust have been very supportive in encouraging staff to undertake the Challenge. An e-mail originally went to all staff to either undertake the survey and challenge - for Bands 1-4, and for Bands 5 upwards to complete a survey."

Now it’s a matter of waiting for the results to come in, and the UNISON ULR team are looking forward to receiving them from National Numeracy, along with recommendations. Once the results are in they will be working with the Trust to achieve the outcomes.