GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

between not voting for UKIP and being politically literate, but I am going to

leave that for you guys to decide, but it shows that political literacy is for

everybody and it is not just something that we are saying that people need, but

it is something that people are demanding and asking for and it is fantastic to

see the GFTU recognising that and being there to support it.

I just wanted to paint a little picture for yourselves. As I am sure you guys are

more than aware, union membership is not exactly the highest amongst young

people, amongst my demographic below. Just to paint a little bit of a picture, in

the UK we currently have just over 3,000 secondary schools, give or take,

including free schools and each has roughly about 1,000 pupils. If the political

literacy course was delivered to all of them, we would have a potential reach of

about 3 million young people. There are currently roughly, and this is obviously

a rough number, about 300 unions in the UK, potentially just a little bit over. If

each union sponsored just one school, just one school, and covered the year’s

subscription for all of those pupils, because the way we work is our platform

has open access to the entire school, so once they subscribe for the academic

year, they can put every single year within that secondary school through the

programme and if each union sponsored just one school we would have a

potential reach of about 300,000 pupils. Our platform automatically sets up

school student unions within the programme. It is something that they have to

go through to complete the political literacy course. So what if each sponsoring

union automatically offered membership, say student membership, to those

pupils that are in the school student union? That would automatically ensure a

rise in membership for the union movement, because at the moment we get

them engaged, we put them through the union process and then when

obviously they leave school there is a drop off rate, because they go off to

either university, to do apprenticeships, to do work, whatever they want to do.

So what if there was a way to link those two together so that when they leave

us they do not just drop off the radar and then you guys with the unions do not

have to go and try and pick them back up again, what if there was a fluid

process? That is one of the things that we would love to have a discussion

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