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styles. It’s also forged new partnerships in higher education - with Leeds Beckett University and
Newman University, Birmingham - to offer new ways of training the trainers in particular.
Most of GFTU’s courses, webinars, festivals and seminars are free to members of affiliated unions. A
forum recently opened on its website for people to swap notes, share best practice and ‘sharpen
minds’ (see
www.gftu.org.uk.) “A generation of trade unionists have had the political content
stripped from their learning,” says Nicholls. “It’s all very interesting knowing the detail of
redundancy and health and safety legislation, but irrelevant if the workplace is closing down as if
because of forces of nature or fate.
“While most people feel austerity is wrong, very few can articulate why it’s come about and the
political and economic alternative. People have been decapitated from the knowledge of our
movement’s history for too long. We have to reconstruct a living appreciation of our past to
accelerate a better future.”
Andrew Mourant is a freelance journalist who has contributed extensively to the Times Educational
Supplement and Education Guardian