We can all improve or expand our skills, thanks to the wide range of online learning opportunities available through unionlearn, explains Director Kevin Rowan.

When Covid-19 forced a temporary halt to classroom courses, unionlearn Director Kevin Rowan and his team swiftly launched a new campaign to help people make the switch to online learning.

Kevin said:

I’m really pleased that we’ve launched Learning @ Home campaign: it’s a really positive contribution that unionlearn can make, and that unions can make, to help people through this difficult period.”

We know that people in isolation need to fill their time productively and what better way to do that than learning new skills?”

The organisation was able to move so quickly within days of the lockdown announcement thanks to the knowledge and skills that staff have developed through the creation of digital tools like SkillCheck and the Apprenticeship Essentials app, the expansion of the webinar programme and design and delivery of online training courses for ULRs and other reps.

Kevin said:

This is the direction of travel we were travelling in before we went into lockdown: in recent years, we’ve seen an exponential growth in the demand for the online and digital and e-learning facilities we’ve developed.”

Some of that growth is in response to the way we’re all living these days and some of it is because our core audience are increasingly under pressure in terms of the time they have, especially the ULRs and other workplace reps.”

As well as putting together the new campaign, which resides on its own landing page on the website, unionlearn was also swift to produce a briefing for union reps to help them support apprentices.

Like their student counterparts, many apprentices who were expecting to be completing their programmes around now found themselves facing enormous uncertainty given the problems posed for end-point assessments (EPAs) by the need for physical distancing.

The briefing, also on the unionlearn website, covers rescheduling of EPAs; breaks in apprenticeships; and employment issues including pay, furlough and redundancy.

It’s exactly the sort of support apprentices would always expect from their union – as Kevin knows first-hand, since he began his working life as an apprentice shipwright in the Barrow shipyard (he switched to the draughtsman programme shortly afterwards).

When Kevin arrived as a cocky teenager in the mid-1980s, his mentor appeared in the shape of Glaswegian convenor Danny Pearson, the kind of labour movement veteran who could forgive a kid’s big mouth when he saw their union potential.

Kevin laughs:

I was probably a bit gobby, and Danny said to me, ‘Rather than just being a gobby little so-and-so, you should use it to make a difference and become active in the union’.”

That was how Kevin came to take on his first union role, elected as a rep for TASS (now part of Unite) one week shy of his 18th birthday.

The new activist would need all his innate verbal skills, plus all the knowledge he acquired on trade union education courses, through the latter part of the ’80s, since management at the recently-privatised shipyard launched a massive programme of job cuts to slash the workforce from 14,000 to 5,000 in just six years.

But Kevin wasn’t just standing up for his members in the shipyard: he was also taking the argument about the value of trade unions into local schools, raising the level of debate among the pupils he met in an era when the labour movement was enduring overwhelmingly negative coverage in the media.

Kevin said:

Terry Molloy and Val Pilson at Preston College got me into doing Trade Unions into Schools as a way of developing my communication and education skills.”

And that very quickly progressed into me getting time off to deliver some trade union education throughout the North West in Preston, Liverpool and other parts of the region.”

When the shipyard cuts programme eventually came for his job too, Kevin (by this time in his mid-20s) used his redundancy money to fund a university degree, and after graduating went on to help set up the Carlisle Trade Union Education Unit.

After working as the GMB’s education officer in the late 1990s, Kevin became Regional Secretary of the Northern TUC in 2002, where he also later (and uniquely) managed the regional unionlearn team as well. After moving into a national role as Head of Organisation and Services at the TUC in 2013, Kevin took on the role of unionlearn director in 2017.

The first challenge Kevin faced as director was external: to overcome the last vestiges of cynicism about union learning among some politicians and civil servants. And he is hopeful that this argument has been won.

Kevin said:

When you get to a point where a Conservative chancellor stands up two years ago at the budget and says unionlearn are part of the solution to our skills challenges in the country, and when I hear from treasury officials that no one does learning and engagement better than trade unions, you can say we’ve made progress,”

The second challenge was internal: to combine the learning and industrial agendas so that those two key strands of union work could fully support each other.

Kevin said:

Three years ago, it still felt that the learning agenda was separate from the industrial and organising agenda, so it’s been important to synergise our work as unionlearn with the TUC’s industrial agenda.”

For Kevin, it remains a high priority to continue to create new resources of all varieties to support union learning reps and all reps promoting learning – even while so many workplaces remain closed – since ULRs are the rock on which unionlearn is built.

Kevin said:

We’re absolutely standing on the shoulders of giants – the union learning reps who are the ones making the difference on a daily basis. Our job as TUC officials and union officials is to give them a bit of wind in their sails.”

They will all need every bit of help they can get to meet the challenges that lie ahead – from using learning and skills to help rebuild the economy once we overcome the Covid-19 crisis, to supporting people with the skills they need for the era of expanding automation and artificial intelligence, with the union contribution towards carbon net-zero. But Kevin is optimistic about what can be done, saying:

Nobody can rest on their laurels because the challenges ahead for us are much greater than the achievements we’ve had so far.”

But while we’ve got major challenges ahead, we’ve also got great strengths to meet them.”

This article first appeared in the Summer 2020 Learning Rep