The Usdaw Union Learning Fund project has gone online to continue supporting learning through lockdown for its members.

Life in lockdown has been a challenge for Usdaw reps, members and officials alike but it’s also had unexpected benefits that have accelerated, evolved and progressed processes that were unforeseen prior to lockdown.

Liaising and communicating was the first issue. Luckily, the lifelong learning team was part of a pilot within Usdaw to look at using Zoom which had already started earlier in the year.

North East Division Lifelong Learning Project Worker Martyn Warwick said.

We have been given access to Zoom to trial by the IT department just after Christmas and a few of us had started testing it, to see its value for remote collaborative working.”

We thought that Zoom might help us to communicate more effectively but we had no idea what was coming! When it looked lockdown was likely to happen, I ensured that the whole team had Zoom installed so we were ready for remote working.”

The team quickly adapted and agreed to schedule weekly catch up meetings to keep the Lifelong Learning campaign moving and respond to the rapidly changing situation. It wasn’t long before the team was starting to look at ways to use Zoom to reach out and engage reps, to show them that the LLL team was still active, support was still there and the learning offer was growing and changing.

Martyn said:

Being able to invite reps from all over the region or other regions to a face to face meeting has been a fantastic change for us.”

It enables more convenient and more regular meetings without the inconvenience of hours of travel for me or other people. It’s something we will keep and use as a tool to support our reps”.

Lockdown has also encouraged other changes, as Martyn explains:

I think COVID forced us to look at how we communicate with our ULRs.”

We developed a system of regular email contact and a weekly ULR email newsletter with updates about the learning offer, what’s new, what’s changed or what’s interesting. ULRs now know exactly what is going on all the time and they can promote and highlight within their sites. To keep other reps up to date, these weekly emails have been collated and complied in a monthly newsletter so reps can print them off, add them to noticeboards and keep their members informed”.

Martyn said there are other new initiatives too:

We have set up UsdawLearn social media accounts on twitter and Facebook.”

This allowed the team to continue to promote the available learning offer and keep up with the changes without diluting the messages that Usdaw put out to help our members – Key Workers remember - during the rapidly developing crisis.”

Whatever the new normal is I am sure that we will incorporate some if not lost of these new practices. It’s helped us to focus on what we need to communicate and how we can best do it.”

Unionlearn has lots of online learning resources on offer through its “Learning @ Home” and “Skills and Recovery” pages.