Taking the trade union route
August 1st 2008 As well as continually publishing guidance on a range of health and safety issues, the TUC offers a comprehensive training programme, explains TUC national education and training officer Liz Rees The TUC safety rep training programme is well established in TUC Education, and is one of its most popular programmes.
Around a fifth of the 52,000 union reps trained by TUC education are safety reps.
TUC training aims to provide everything a safety rep needs to know to represent their members effectively, and to assist and support reps in dealing with workplace problems. Courses are free to safety reps from affiliated unions and are accredited by the National Open College Network (NOCN) and the Institution of Safety and Health (IOSH).
The TUC offers a range of courses on health and safety from short certificate courses to full diplomas.
During the past year, the TUC has been working with the Qualification Curriculum Authority (QCA), the body that determines the adult education curriculum for the UK, so that more TUC courses are given qualification credits. For example, safety reps who attend TUC courses will now achieve formal qualifications at three levels awards (short courses), certificates (Health and Safety Stages 1 and 2) and diplomas. This will help everyone to understand the standard of learning involved in health and safety courses.
The number of health and safety students continues to grow across all strands of training. The fastest growth has been the TUC health and safety short course. In 2007, an additional 1,156 students attended courses, compared to 2006. The Diploma is also growing in popularity, with significant numbers choosing to take it online.
Health and safety remains the most popular area of the curriculum offered online.
Online students are either those who have no release arrangements for training or those who have already exhausted their release entitlement and want to continue to update their skills. The health and safety curriculum has a well thought out continuing safety rep development programme, which is used both by trade union IOSH members who want to fulfil their CPD requirements the trade union way and by safety reps who want to keep themselves up to date with developments.
The TUC constantly publishes new and improved health and safety guidance.
The most recent booklet, Occupational Health dealing with the issues, contains activities, information, checklists and advice on the range of occupational health matters including; prevention, evaluating occupational health services, negotiating health and safety at work, as well as issues such as cancer, stress, mental health and much more.
Find out more about the TUC's health and safety training programme by logging onto the unionlearn website: www.unionlearn.org.uk Raising standards in SMEs
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