GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

and so forth. I think it is fair to say, the more meetings we have had and the

more we have advance it has become clearer to us that there could not

possibly be something out there, because we have not done it. If Martin was

here I would thank him, because he has been absolutely fantastic to us and I

think his involvement has taught him about what we do and he has become

really, really interested in it and become a real part of the team.

The first stage was you go on to the website and it is called an apprenticeship

builder. We have a look and we have got to register that we have got a

trailblazer together. So my colleagues that are in the room very kindly gave me

permission to say we are in and that is great. So that is the first one ticked.

Then we began to look at what we had to do. The first thing that you do is you

create the duties, what is it we do? We started off with some of what was

talked about today. To get to where we want to be we might need to look back

at where we came from, so the very first duty is about history of trade unionism,

so we have factored that in. I will not tell you all the 14, but you can imagine –

negotiations, industrial action, health and safety inspections, trade union

learning reps - the things that we do every day and there is only us that does

them. So we filled in the duty planner and we came as a subgroup to 14 of

them. Then we took them back to the trailblazer group for the trailblazer group

to have a look and see if we needed to add anything or change anything. A bit

of toing and froing, a bit of changing, changing the words, the job is a good ‘un.

That then moves you into the next section which is the KSBs – knowledge,

skills and behaviours. What knowledge, skills and behaviours do we have for

the duty? Okay. So we began to flesh that out. When we were comfortable

with this and when our lead from the Institute of Apprenticeships agreed with us

we were comfortable, it came to submission point and this is the critical point,

because the submission point is a yes or a no from the Institute of

Apprenticeships that there is a need for this type of apprenticeship. Not that

there is one similar. Is there a need for it? That submission goes through two

phases. The first phase is the submission to the committee and that is a group

of employers. I was a little bit nervous about that one, because I thought no

trade unionist on it, employers. The off the record nod came back and said,

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