Functional Skills
I believe there are many different ways to embed elements of functional skills in to my specialist area, travel and tourism.
The learners can deal with lots of different situations such as searching for suitable holidays by checking the routes, dates, different airports, hotels, board basis and budgets on the internet and at local travel agents, getting accurate prices and adding on any relevant extras such as insurance and parking. Also the students will help in organising days out trips and class holidays; again to include pricing; by doing this they are using maths, English and IT skills throughout the course.
The students in travel and tourism have to do a whole unit on the importance of customer service this includes writing letters to customers, face to face role plays where they will feed back holiday information and prices, dealing with customers on the telephone and group discussion.
This also shows Speaking, listening and writing skills used in English.
All travel and tourism assignments must be word processed and the students show they can use computer storage (USB) they can use different programs through out the course such as
* Word
* Excel
* Power point
* Internet
All of the above are used in presentations given to the class by groups and individual students
Students also do a unit on over seas representatives which includes a practical task of a welcome meeting to a certain area and a coach welcome- again this is showing the students communication, maths and English skills.
All of the above activities include personal, learning and thinking skills of the students. They would have to ask the customers questions about the type of holiday they wanted and use their own initiative to find suitable options and generate their own ideas of the customers’ wants and needs.