UNISON Ulearn Northern Ireland

I’ve been in the Royal for about 5 years and before that I was a care assistant in a nursing home. I left school with my GCSEs and wanted to work in childcare. So I worked as a classroom assistant in Parkview Special Needs School in Lisburn for three years and did my NVQ in Childcare. Then I went on a scheme with Springboard, where I was able to do City & Guilds qualifications and also got to do three month placements in America and Dublin.

After that I started working in a nursing home, and applied for the Royal, but it was ages before I heard anything, so also did some work as a play therapist and then in a bakery for a while. I started working in medical in the Royal and it was my boyfriend who got me to join UNISON. I did the NVQ in the Royal and wanted to do something different, so I went onto UNISON’s learning website to find out about what was available. I wanted to do a wee bit of study to better myself, but didn’t want to take on too much. I read about the Openings 20 week courses and thought they might be interesting.

I chose Understanding Society which covered different topics such as housing, social issues, different cultures/religions and health. It was really interesting reading about different issues and having to make your own arguments. I liked the way you worked yourself with the tutorials on the phone. I was working a lot of extra hours, so it would have been hard to commit to a regular class. I got the book, a CD and DVD which were all really helpful and easy to follow. We had to do three assignments but all the information was there. Even though it was there I got really into some of the subjects and went online to get more information.

I decided to do Understanding Health after that, it was really good as well and it gave me a better understanding of broader health issues. But I was pregnant while doing the course and I got distracted, so didn’t get to spend as much time on it as I would have liked. Overall though, I really enjoyed the Openings programmes, they got me back into the way of studying and I’ve since encouraged my friend to start one.