During the past 2 years, Usdaw’s lifelong learning campaign in the Southern Division has been very successful in delivering functional skill courses at Tesco customer fulfilment centres – stores which deliver solely to on-line customers.

ESOL has been a big part of this offer.  

Project Worker Lawrence Miller said:

We have delivered courses in English, Maths, ICT and ESOL to Crawley, Croydon, Erith & Aylesford CFC’s.”

We work towards setting up on site learning facilities as this makes it much easier for staff to access learning.”

This next step was to transfer this success to the company’s Distribution Centres.

Lawrence explained:

We have now started working closely with the Tesco Distribution site in Southampton Nursling where no learning has taken place for a long time.”

The first campaign at the site highlighted a demand for English, especially with the agency staff.

Lawrence said:

Around 90% of staff are Eastern European so ESOL was a big demand.”

We had no union learner reps and no learning centre to deliver courses so there was a bit of work to do,” he says, “though one plus is that we did have a provider keen to deliver the courses required”.

The first step was to meet up with site management, as Lawrence recalled:

I had a meeting with Alice Hallem the site Personnel Manager.”

She was eager for Usdaw to upskill her staff and had several suggestions for staff that could be potential union learner representatives. We put posters up asking for interest in becoming reps but in the meantime, we forged ahead and began assessing employee’s needs for ESOL”.

The assessments themselves raised interest in learning and pretty soon three Usdaw members had put themselves forward as potential ULRs.

Lawrence said:

Pretty soon we had completed over 50 assessments and it was clear that we would be able to run courses, and we able to put together a space for learning to teach the courses”.

To date 36 employees have enrolled on ESOL courses and they are scheduled to start in the autumn.

Lawrence added that:

Alice has told me she is very happy that we are helping to upskill the staff that so needed the help.”

And we have now had the go ahead to purchase computers so that people will be able to and to give people a chance to work on their English on their own. We can also start planning to deliver ICT courses and support the apprentices on site”.