Tom Wilson: 'The UK does badly in terms of the proportion of its workers with high-level skills'

Listening to one of the early-evening comedy sketch programmes recently on Radio 4, I could not help being irritated by the portrayal of a union rep as the unreconstructed northern male of the industrial Seventies. It was not just that it was lazy shorthand, it was that this stereotype could not be further from the truth.

Yes, one of the main roles of unions is to protect the jobs of their members – with strike action if necessary – and to make sure they are paid fairly and work in safe conditions. But another very important role is that of the union learning reps (ULRs) who work alongside their colleagues to promote increased learning and training in the office, factory, building site and bus depot.

Since 1999, unionlearn has trained more than 23,000 ULRs. They come in all shapes and sizes and a good many of them are women. Their unique selling point is that they can reach the parts of the workforce that no one else can get to. They are working with groups who have no qualifications, or without a good grasp of English, and are also operating among the managers of engineering firms and along the corridors of power in Whitehall. They are acting as mentors to apprentices and they are negotiating with managers to allow people time off to train. They are giving their colleagues the confidence to get back into learning and releasing the latent talent that has been squandered by the education system.

It is great to hear people saying "I can now read to my grandchild" or "I can help my children with their maths homework now". It is also enormously heartening to hear employers commenting on the essential role ULRs have played in filling skills gaps.

At a recent unionlearn event, Dave Morgan, training and liaison officer for Chamberlin & Hill, a foundry in Walsall, explained the benefits of a unionlearn learning centre on the works site. The company had been using down time caused by the recession to put on a range of courses. He said: "The workforce is now much more confident and ready to tackle challenge and change... We have a lot of workers who have been with us for decades, who are now not qualified for the developments and innovations in the industry. The centre is allowing us to address that. It has been fantastic to see a real awakening in people to the opportunities learning brings them. They are all coming back and asking: 'What next?'."

In international comparisons, the UK does badly in terms of the proportion of its workers with high-level skills: one in eight adults has no qualifications and almost a half are not qualified beyond Level 2 (5 A*-C GCSEs). To close the skills gap with our competitors, we need to have a culture in which employers and individuals place a high value on learning.

A third of employers offer no form of training: it is patent nonsense that people's educational development should end on the day they leave the school or college gate for the last time. The benefits of an educated, skilled workforce are blindingly obvious. Research suggests that an increase of 1 percentage point in the proportion of employees trained could result in an increased productivity worth up to £6m to the economy.

The great strength of unionlearn is it is forming partnerships that create positive relations in the workplace. Companies such as Merseytravel say that learning agreements are still honoured even if the management and unions are in dispute. This was the case at Royal Mail during recent strike action. In a bakery in Barnsley, the ULRs negotiated an "exceedingly good" deal in which management now eat with the workers in the canteen after being persuaded to turn their restaurant into a learning centre for staff.

Unionlearn also plays a strategic role in looking to the development of skills for the future. In the North-east, which has been hit hard by the economic downturn, we are investigating the development and retraining of the workforce to play a role in the new green technologies, such as the proposed expansion of wind turbines.

Last week I felt very proud to be director of unionlearn when I attended the Union Learning Fund awards. It was a fantastic showcase for the work our reps and project workers are doing to support learners and to promote equality and diversity in the workplace.