Community believes that education and access to learning and training are a fundamental human right for everyone. Education is power, it builds confidence and self esteem and gives dignity and respect.
As an integral part of Community, Communitas Ltd strive constantly to provide the best education, training and learning opportunities to the members, their families and communities.
As a union one of the most important things we do is the education and training of branch officials, which of course now includes ULRs. The education and training programme is designed to help lay officials run their branches and provide the most effective representation to our members. We are pleased that in the last two years more branch officials have been trained than ever before. Over 2200 days of training were delivered through our own education programme and 275 days through GFTU and TUC during this time.
Because we know how essential the education and training is for new officials and especially at greenfield sites, we will ensure that all new branch officials will receive their first training within 12 weeks of their election and their follow up training not later than 12 weeks after this.
Access to the education and training programme must be available to everyone
and we have been aware for some time that our traditional delivery and
presentation of material in a strictly written format present barriers to some
of our members. Therefore this year we are piloting a series of courses for
people with access issues. These courses are mainly for our colleagues from
NLBD, but if you feel these courses would be valuable to you, please contact
your branch or divisional officers.
All programmes are accredited and as part of the routine
re-accreditation this year we have reviewed the whole programme to ensure that
the topics are relevant, eliminate any duplication and take into account the
changing workplace and political agenda, for example how we deal with the rise
of the BNP and the damaging impact it can have in the workplace.
The programme offers the training over one, two and five day divisional schools with new modules on lifelong learning, globalisation and community unionism, alongside the more traditional branch management, organisation and mapping, equal opportunities, communication and specialised training for health and safety and union learning representatives. We have introduced a series of more intensive short courses on negotiation, communication skills, understanding employment law, understanding contract law, finance for non financial people, basic skills and dyslexia awareness.