Martin Merritt is a Lifelong Learning officer with UNISON covering workplaces across Southampton, including Solent University. As part of his role Martin has been keen to support facilities staff at the university develop their skills.

For a large number of staff, English is not their first language – and to help this group Martin felt it was important to look at ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) classes. The first group of learners have just completed an ESOL course held at Solent University organised by Martin.

Martin said:

Once I’d identified a need, it was a matter of finding a tutor and a room. Fortunately UNISON have a national agreement with the Workers Education Association (WEA) – and I contacted the local branch to see if a tutor was available.”

Once a provider was in place Martin got touch with UNISON’s life-long learning team and put in a bid for some Kickstarter funding to pay for the course. Once the funding was approved, Martin was ready to start recruiting learners.

At Solent University Martin worked closely with Union Learning Rep (ULR) Antero Aguir and together they started to advertise the ESOL course to cleaners across the campus. Eight students signed up, committing themselves to the 10 week course.

Martin said:

We arranged the course to fit around work and family commitments – the chair of the UNISON branch negotiated the use of a room for the course with the employer, and the WEA tutor was very helpful in fitting sessions to the learners needs.”

As the course was on site this really helped with attendance, and everyone who signed up stayed on for the full course with no drop outs.”

Martin has been impressed not only by the dedication of the learners – but also by the way they have developed as the course progressed.

Martin felt it importnat to support his learners throughout the process and said:

I sat in on all the classes to support the members. It was brilliant to see how everyone developed, not only with the English skills, but also with their confidence.”

Feedback from the 10 week course has been very positive – learners have said that “I really enjoyed the course, everyone very friendly”, “Very good course.” and “I enjoyed as I have learned new words.”

This is just the beginning for the cleaning learners from Solent as Martin explained: 

This is the first session like this, but not the last. Following on from this I realised that there is a need to support members with IT and maths skills. With this in mind I have asked the WEA to put a package together which will help learners. The plan is to explore rolling this out later in the year.”