GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

specialism in terms of moving individuals forward. Again, the question is how

do we sustain that. We engage with communities. We have got a fantastic

project and Nicky can talk about with Aspire. Aspire is a housing charity that

has about 800 service users. Those service users (or clients if you want to use

the kind of marketisation language) need education and we have entered into a

partnership with Aspire to do this. Nicky brokered this. We are running a pilot

at the moment to see how we can meaningful long term difference to these

individuals and really change their lives.

The College of Sanctuary, again that is a national initiative and we are seeking

recognition for that as a college so that we can work even more proactively with

marginalised groups in society and provide that kind of complete level of

security around coming to the college and doing qualifications and moving on.

We deliver degrees of a social purpose. We choose all the difficult things like

youth work and so on that are under the cosh. They are being diminished. It

has been destroyed in many senses, but we still persist in believing that the

right thing to do is provide these programmes to maintain that service as it is

and to grow it. I think ultimately, because we engage in lots of these kind of

programmes, we are about transforming lives and communities. Within that we

are also about education for its own sake and this year we have relaunched

history at the college. As a historian, which is a great joy to me, I did some

history teaching which was a bit of a shock, because I have not done that for a

few years, but we are finding that there is a noble purpose obviously for the

movement and for individuals in teaching history and it harks back to our routes in this 120 th year of Raph Samuel who was the leading light of working class

history essentially and a key alumni of Ruskin College, but I can talk to you

individually about that during the course of this evening and so on.

Trade union education. 2,000 workers a year across the country go through

our books essentially, most of them with low levels of qualification, so we are

doing the right thing there. Ruskin College is doing the right thing in terms of

providing that training and opportunity. We have a large community based

programme with Unite. That is for the unemployed. We have weekend

courses where we develop skills and we help those individuals to go on the

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