Andy Burnham has given a cutting response to Nigel Farage’s attack on a Manchester scheme which helps refugees access housing, benefits and public services.

In a divisive post on X, Farage claimed that a £700,000 Greater Manchester Authority scheme that helps refugees who have been granted asylum proves “Andy Burnham is for them, not for you”. 

In a move that seemed to mimic Donald Trump’s use of AI slop, the Reform leader also shared an AI-generated image of refugees on a boat smiling and holding signs with the slogan ‘Vote Andy For Us’. 

Responding to Farage’s attack, Burnham wrote: “Are you getting desperate, lad? Maybe keep your crypto millions for something else.”

The Labour mayor and Makerfield by-election candidate also responded to a post on Reform’s X account, which shared the same image and slogan, stating: “Getting worried? Desperate stuff even by your standards.”

Farage then responded with a link to a Telegraph article about the initiative, claiming: “Your scheme will provide housing and benefits to people who came here illegally.

“I prefer to put the British people first.”

A Survation poll of voting intentions in the upcoming Makerfield by-election on 18 June puts support for Burnham at 43%, three points ahead of Reform’s Robert Kenyon on 40%.

Safe Transitions is a Refugee Lodging Scheme, designed to prevent homelessness among newly recognised refugees and support long-term independence and integration.

Seeking asylum is a fundamental human right under Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and is also protected by the 1951 Refugee Convention.

Despite Farage and the Right saying refugees come to the UK “illegally”, individuals fleeing persecution, war, or severe harm have the legal right to cross international borders to seek safety. 

Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward

The post Andy Burnham calls Farage ‘desperate’ for attacking Manchester refugee support scheme appeared first on Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK's progressive debate.

Earlier this year, our team worked with the Digital Skills team to develop a short webinar aimed at staff who support students. The goal was to help our colleagues understand how students can use MyEd to traverse our complex digital estate more effectively.

Why the webinar was needed

The primary need that this webinar fulfils is that staff generally aren’t able to see what a student sees in MyEd. MyEd personalises its content and layout depending on the user, so a staff member will have a completely different experience to a student. This is one of MyEd’s key features: students only see content which is relevant to students, and the same principle applies to staff and applicants. However, this does pose a challenge for support staff who need to know how a student can navigate MyEd to complete the tasks that matter to them.

This is something that support staff have fed back to us for some time, so it has been good to develop the webinar as a solution.

We developed the webinar with support staff in mind

When developing the webinar, we made sure that the session was as concise as possible. We settled on a run time of 30 minutes (20 minutes of content and 10 minutes of discussion) as we are aware of the many pulls on our support colleagues’ time.

When deciding on the content, we chose to focus on three elements:

• Explain in detail how the content and layout of MyEd differs between different user types
• Provide a walkthrough of the main tasks that students complete through MyEd
• Demonstrate how the Favourites function in MyEd can be used by students to highlight the items that are most important to them

The webinar needed additional support materials

While we thought that the short demonstration of the student view in MyEd was valuable, we expected that viewers were likely to want to take screenshots for their own personal reference. We thought that this would be undesirable, as such screenshots could become obsolete should the layout or content changed in the future.

For this reason, we decided to provide a set of up-to-date screenshots on the MyEd Support Hub and promote this during the webinar. Now support staff can reference this resource and be safe in the knowledge that the information is remains correct. This resource is available to everyone with a University of Edinburgh Office 365 login:

Student view of MyEd in the MyEd Support Hub

We are planning to continue these sessions in the new year

So far, we have delivered 5 sessions to 61 attendees. Feedback has been positive, with many attendees indicating that the new resource in the MyEd Support Hub was the most interesting part of the session.

We plan to continue to deliver these sessions in the new year. If you or someone you know is interested in attending one of these sessions, please feel free to contact me and I’ll make sure that you are informed when the next batch of sessions are scheduled.

Episode Summary Getting support for ADHD at work can feel risky, especially if you’re unsure whether to disclose. In this episode, Marla talks with neurodivergent HR expert and former Amazon leader Kate Broeking about how professionals with ADHD can advocate for what they need, protect their performance, and navigate the process with clarity and confidence....

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