South East Regional Homepage

Joe Showler

South East Learning Project Worker

Do you want to know more about the CWU’s lifelong learning project?

Would you like information about how to provide learning opportunities for members?

Do you want training to become a Union Learning Rep?

Are you interested in setting up a workplace learning centre?

As a Union Learning Rep, are you looking to develop further skills?

Do you need funding to help develop your workplace learning centre? 

Lifelong Learning in the South East

The Union aims to connect members across the South East with interesting, exciting and enjoyable learning opportunities through a network of trained Union Learning Reps - most Branches now have at least one!  

Union Learning Reps organise the learning opportunities that members want, at a time and place that suits, and at minimal cost - wherever possible for free!

What does this involve? It might involve staging tutor-led courses in your workplace, or organising informal learning events, or on-line courses, or it could simply be a matter of putting members in touch with courses which are already available locally.  Perhaps you have the space to set up your own workplace learning centre. It’s about providing good quality enjoyable learning experiences that our members want. 

Benefits to the Union

The lifelong learning project not only provides a valuable service to members, it helps to strengthen the Union in other ways.

· As an effective tool for recruitment

· Bringing people together to promote unity

· Reaching groups of workers which have traditionally been difficult to reach

· Providing members with the skills and the confidence they need to defend their own and each others’ rights and interests. 

If you educate a man you educate a person, but if you educate a woman, you educate a family. - Rudy Manikan

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world. – Nelson Mandela 

I have visited sweatshops, factories, and crowded slums. If I could not see it, I could smell it. The foundation of society is laid upon a basis of . . . individualism, conquest and exploitation . . . A social order such as this, built upon such wrong and basic principles, is bound to retard the development of all. The output of a cotton mill or a coal mine is considered of greater importance than the production of healthy, happy-hearted and free human beings. We, the people, are not free. Our democracy is but a name. - Helen Keller

 Justice is the goal. Solidarity is the tool. Education is the key.