GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

also believe that education works best in a workplace where people, whether

they be learners or teachers, are cocreators of the educational experience and

are supported and enabled to give of their best. Almost all of our students at

our university will spend some time in a workplace experiencing what it might

be like in the world of work and a very large and important part of their learning

and their development comes from that process.

That is why we are proud to be a partner of GFTU in developing educational

opportunities for your members. We are working with you now to develop a

gold standard Training the Trade Union Educator programme which we hope

will become an enabler for those who want to deliver any form of training within

the trade union movement, but we also hope that this will become the start of a

much broader and deeper partnership with you. Many of the unions here that

are affiliated to GFTU also hold common ground with our university. We, for

instance, teach psychology, broadcast journalism, broadcast technology,

cinematography, theatre, management, music performance and production

social work, sports management, coaching and performance development and

on the latter (and I will just say this, because I say this everywhere I go now) if

Leeds Beckett had been a country; that is, all of our staff, all of our students

and all of our former students had been formed together as some kind of nation

state we would have been ahead of Switzerland in both the Olympic Games

and the Paralympics.

One of the first people I met was our chief athletics coach when I joined the

university, Mick Hill, who worked quietly and silently and out of the glare of

publicity with Jessica Ennis-Hill, one of Britain’s greatest ever athletes. When

he started working with her she could throw the javelin 25 metres, when he

finished working with her she could throw it 47! I asked him how he did it,

because I have had the good fortune to meet her once, and she is actually tiny

and he said, “It is all about timing, it is all about technique and it is all about

confidence” and that seems quite a metaphor for the educational process in

itself.

102