Lifelong Learning Strategy

GMBs core purpose is that every GMB member should have the opportunity to discover and develop their talents and that is why having members accessing lifelong learning is part of their membership benefits.

Historically the founder of GMB, Will Thorne was assisted by his colleague and GMBs co-founder Eleanor Marx to improve his reading and writing more than a century ago.

From the very first the union took education seriously. It contested elections for School Boards – to get working people involved in education – even before it fought council and parliamentary elections. It ran night schools for Gas Workers who came to the class room straight from the furnaces, after 12 and 18 hour shifts; and it sponsored Socialist Sunday Schools for their children.

The union taught its members the skills and the ideas they needed. If Thorne was the first beneficiary, then hundreds of thousands of others have been helped with the insights and techniques needed to improve their own lives and to build the union, itself.

Today, this need is as vital – and as liberating – as it ever was.  GMB is acting to bring it into the modern age, to inform and shape our 21st century union.  The concept isn’t new but the introduction of The GMB National Lifelong Learning Committee, certainly is.

This webpage is dedicated to making education available to each and every GMB member in all 9 regions.  The education of GMB members is a building block of workplace organisation. As such, it is not a luxury but a necessity for a healthy, thriving union.  Lifelong learning for GMB is a core GMB business.

Please find below additional information on the GMB Ruskin College Scholarship Fund and an application form in the resources section of this page.