This year’s Learning at Work Week (LAWW) theme of Curious and Creative gave Union Learning Reps at Blackpool NHS Trust a chance to give their maths workshops an Alice in Wonderland twist and sign up more Numeracy Champions.

UNISON ULRs Jane Eyre and Beverley Herring also decided to take advantage of the support offered from LAWW organisers to provide ideas for their activities.

Jane said:

We attended one of Campaign for Learning workshops with Julia Wright on how to run a great event and during that workshop she suggested we make our workshop titles interesting so we used an Alice theme and gave them all interesting title such as 'Don't wear an Alice Band' which was actually a hair up workshop where a professional hairdresser did a work shop on putting your hair up and holiday hair.

Another one was Curious Conundrums which was really a Numeracy workshop!"

The reps organised an opening extravaganza on the Monday with Blackpool's world famous drag revue Funny Girls.  

Bev explained:

The reason behind us getting them in was that they fitted with our theme....people are curious about them and they are very creative. 

After their amazing performance they cut out Alice in Wonderland and workshops themed cake and the dancers gave pieces away to staff and visitors."

Throughout the week daily events were held on the Mezzanine including:

• Literacy and numeracy conundrums with prizes
• A Madhatter's tea party where people had to guess the flavour of 3 cakes and 3 teas and the prize, which was very generously donated, was afternoon tea for two at Alice's tearoom in St. Anne's  
• A design your own Alice in Wonderland t-shirt competition and the prize was a £25 book voucher and book  
• Hangman with medical words
• Garden dominoes and quoits

The National Numeracy team had a stand and the ULRs enrolled 11 Numeracy Champions who received their training on the Tuesday. This tied in really well with a planned National Numeracy project for 2017/18, so that the Champions will be in place for the launch later in the year.

On the last day they joined in the Dementia Day and had an Alice in Wonderland photo booth and staff could have fun photos taken with just a donation to the Trusts Blue Skies charity.

Jane and Bev made a point of using as many local businesses as possible thus including the community and promoting these businesses, as well as having a glossy leaflet designed for them by UNISON's printing services in Leeds to promote the week.  All activities were open to all staff allowing non UNISON members to attend.  

Jane summed up the week, saying:

We held 24 workshops in the week with 130 attendees.  It would have been more but due to the cyber-attack people had to drop out. 

We are looking to hold some of the workshops again later in the year as the feedback was really positive.

The union had the full support of the Trust and the week was endorsed by our Chief Executive and Director of HR and OD allowing staff time out during the working day to attend."

Bev added:

We felt we were successful in bringing people who said they would never attend learning courses to our workshops therefore achieving to break down barriers and discussing with attendees all that a UNISON has to offer. 

We recruited new members and one new ULR."