TRADE unions have a longstanding link with Ruskin College and over 90 years ago members of the Union of Postal Workers and the Post Office Engineering Union were undertaking distance learning courses via this important labour movement institution. 

These early courses did not require vast amounts of public funding. However, they did require very significant commitment from educators, trade unions and students. 

There is little doubt that type of education had an impact and gave us working-class ideas, activists and political representatives. 

So, as trade unionists, academics and progressives gather this weekend to debate and question the very real challenges for working-class education, it is fitting that the venue will be Ruskin College, Oxford. 

We will be listening carefully to Jeremy Corbyn, who will be speaking on Labour’s much-heralded “cradle-to-grave” national education service.

I would very much want to hear how it will help to change society by removing some of the layers of class advantage that characterise and blight the current educational system.

The present crisis for working-class education is powered by a combination of the decimation of funding for adult education, the commodification of higher education and the lack of decent work-based technical education for the young. 

But really the crisis starts far earlier in our school system where we see rampant academisation, the systematic undermining of the teaching profession and a school curriculum that rewards conformity, compliance and convention. 

And below all this sits an ideological attack that says that education for profit is preferable to education as a common societal good, and that learning for empowerment, for curiosity and for pleasure is somehow not valid. 

This is a vision of education that feeds our growing inequality and undermines the culture, confidence, prosperity and security of working-class people.

So, for myself, as a trade union educator, there are tough questions about how the movement can develop new models and methods, not only to sustain independent working-class education, but to expand it. 

There is a real urgency for unions to play a key role in this debate and to reach out to the people we have lost, left behind or who cannot conceive that working-class political education has anything to offer them.

So our challenge is to come out of the echo chamber and to speak and engage with those workers who voted for Ukip, to the millions who did not vote at all and to those who certainly do not consider themselves to be “left” or even political.

It will take new ideas, methods and approaches to reach those who need working-class education most. 

The young people who languish in the zero-hours, below minimum wage, bogus self-employed world of the so called “gig” economy who are a large and growing part of the workforce, for whom collective bargaining and trade union representation are irrelevant and almost alien concepts. 

Trade unions, through working with organisations, communities and institutions that share our values, are already starting to develop these alternatives — designing content based on our shared values of collectivism, solidarity, social justice, equality and democracy.

And with programmes that are broad-based, accessible, flexible and that crucially make use of the digital learning tools that we can now call on and must use.

And if we are to counter the negative and narrow identity politics of today, we need education that does much more than deliver competent trade union reps. 

Instead we need to be ambitious in developing education that builds on our rich working-class history and culture as well as providing economic and political alternatives to the populist so-called “alt-right” agenda.

• Trish Lavelle is Communication Workers Union head of education and training.

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