Usdaw ULR Fliss Pryce-Page won this year’s TUC learning award at Congress in recognition of the support she is giving to Tesco workers from Skegness to Leicester.

This year’s winner of the TUC Congress learning award is Usdaw learning rep Felicity Pryce-Page (Fliss to everyone who knows her), who has already chalked up a string of successes in the two years since she took on the role.

Fliss said:

When I saw the vacancy for ULR, I didn’t know what it entailed but it just felt right: it seemed to provide me with a way of combining being a customer assistant at Tesco (my day job at the time) with my ambition to help people get the learning opportunities they deserved, so I gave it a go!”

But Fliss has done much more than give it a go: she has made a real difference to dozens of her 140-plus colleagues at the superstore and many more in her new region-wide job as a people trainer for the supermarket giant.

The first course Fliss organised in Lincoln was IT for the Terrified, an introduction to working with computers delivered at the store by tutors from nearby Lincoln College.

Fliss said:

One lady had never been able to do any e-learning in the past but the greatest accolade came at the end of the course when her manager said to me that he couldn’t believe she’d just done an hour’s e-learning on her own – that was a golden moment that makes it all worthwhile.”

Fliss followed the IT sessions with a nine-week Polish for beginners course, which has not only enabled some of her colleagues to grasp the basics of the language but also helped provide a welcoming and inclusive environment to the many Polish migrants who live near the superstore.

Fliss explained:

If you can communicate, people in the local area come into the store because they know they will be well looked after and can have that basic conversation.”

It’s the same with sign language, which we have also run.”

In addition, Fliss has helped encourage more colleagues to return to learning through informal sessions on flower arranging and profiterole baking, ran dementia awareness sessions with Dementia Friends and supported several co-workers undertaking online courses with the help of the union.

Local management have been very supportive from the beginning, as Fliss points out:

The key to success with the ULR role is that you have to get the management onboard.”

The support has proved vital in a retail environment where the norm is shift work that can end up preventing people from taking part in courses because of scheduling problems, as Fliss says:

If anybody couldn’t make a course, we spoke to management very nicely about shift-swapping or backfilling or moving times around so that no one felt disadvantaged and no one missed out.”

The appetite for learning that she has helped create has clearly unlocked something in her co-workers – as is evidenced in their replies to the latest colleague satisfaction survey at the store.

This is a pretty static store where people have been a long time so under ‘What matters to you’, the comments are usually on this or that issue, but this time, when it came back, the comments were, ‘There aren’t enough courses’ and ‘When are the next courses?’ which gave me a lot of personal satisfaction.”

Fliss says the successful development of the learning culture at the Lincoln superstore is down to a combination of factors.

It’s not a solo mission: it’s about the managers who have said Yes, it’s about all the Usdaw people – the reps and the members and my local organiser – it’s about the colleges who have said Yes: I happened to be there at the right time in the right place.”

After combining her ULR role with her former job as a customer assistant, Fliss successfully applied for a new role as a people trainer across 32 different Tesco Express (convenience) stores, which lie in a wide geographical range from a single site in the village of Ingoldmells near Skegness all the way down to the dozen dotted around the city of Leicester.

Fliss said:

When the role came up a year ago, I looked at it and thought, ‘Now that I’m 54, I’d like to have a final flourish and prove what I can do!’”

It’s a brilliant way to dovetail this work: you’ve got the corporate training package, which is absolutely fantastic, and the lifelong learning, which is helping people be absolutely the best they can be.”

The new role has brought new challenges, since the staff demographic in Leicester is very different from that in Lincoln, as Fliss reports:

English is a second language for a lot of our members of staff so we’re bringing ESOL to them: I thought that would be a difficult wall to overcome because it’s tricky when it’s not the first language but they’re embracing that at the moment.”

Fliss is also currently one of 40 learners from her old store taking part in a Level 2 Mental Health Awareness course (there are another 100 on the waiting list), as she explains:

We’ve brought Level 2 accredited courses into Tesco’s and that’s amazing, changing people’s perception of mental health in the workplace: the people who’ve been on it have said it’s been magic, it’s helped them at work and at home.”

This is the most important area to me: people are facing all kind of issues every day and I think it’s now time to hit this one big-time and get rid of the stigma within the workplace once and for all.”

Usdaw Project Worker Neil Chapman was very proud that Fliss won the union learning award.

Neil said:

She’s got time for everybody, nothing is ever a problem and she’s always there for people when they need her.”

Fliss says she loves everything about her ULR role but the big reward is seeing the change in people whose starting point is that they won’t be able to learn something new.

Giving people the confidence to do things they wouldn’t have initially thought possible and then seeing the pride they have when they’re standing with a certificate they never thought they’d get – that’s number one.”

This story first appeared in the unionlearn Winter 2018 Learning Rep.