Functional Skills

Functional Skills Functional skills are qualifications in English, maths and ICT that  equip learners with the basic practical skills required in everyday life, education and the workplace. To ensure that Functional skills are assessable to all learners they are available at Entry Level 1 through to Level 2. Employers are crying out for workers with sound Functional Skills – they are essential skills that are genuinely in demand. With good Functional Skills your students will have the ability to draw on a bank of transferable skills to help them succeed in all areas of life.Functional skills where introduced due to the Wolf Report to replace the old key skills as a result of a gap in skills whichThe Secretary of State for Education commissioned Professor Alison Wolf of King’s College London to carry out an independent review of vocational education. She was asked to consider how vocational education for 14- to 19-year-olds can be improved  in order to  promote suc cessful progression into the labour market and into higher level education and training routes.She was also asked to provide practical recommendations to help inform future policy direction, taking into account current financial constraints. The review has been informed by over 400 pieces of evidence from the public, a number of visits to colleges, academies and training providers, and interviews and discussion sessions with key partners in the sector. Alison Wolf comments in FAQ’s in edexel. com that , â€Å"Functional Skills pass rates are lower than Key Skills pass rates.This is still true post-pilot, and on one level may be due to this being a new qualification. However, rather than having negative connotations, this proves that standards are higher and a more legitimate marker of quality (cross-reference Key Skills where the pass rate is almost 100%). Functional Skills are challenging, worthwhile qualifications, denoting a marker of student excellence FAQs – Func tional Skills and the Wolf Report – Edexcelwww. edexcel. comFunctional skills ran as a three year pilot scheme from Sept 2007 and was officially rolled out nationally in Sept 2010 We use basic skills on a daily basis – while driving a car, cooking, making purchases, supporting our children in schoolwork. These daily tasks may present challenges for adult literacy learners, because they incorporate skills from a variety of academic areas – when driving you must read street signs very quickly; when cooking you use measuring tools or calculate with fractions.Yet some learners may state, â€Å"I don’t read much,† or â€Å"I never use math. † Teachers can help learners make connections between what they are learning in class and every-day functional skills by the contextualization of instruction. The 3 functional skills are MATHS Functional maths is what we use every day e. g counting money, calculating shopping bills basic money management addin g these childrens dinner money ? 2. 00 per day x 5 Days a week = ? 10, measuring area etc for carpets , wallpaper, cooking we weigh and measure ingredients.ICT Functional ict is everyday uses including online banking , paying household bills , renewing car insurance , online shopping and searching for best deals , reading e mails, texting friends ENGLISH Functional English is everyday tasks such as writing a shopping list , reading the mail reading the newspaper, reading the road signs when driving, checking shopping purchases on receipts, using e mail reading and replying. holding an everyday conversation requires speaking and listening skills. The delivery of Functional Skills should be embedded into all curriculum areas by using contextualized teaching materials, In my area of Art I can incorporate and plan functional skills in sessions by †¢ Maths , in art learners regularly use ratio to mix art materials , e. g paint and water 2-1, mixing plaster of paris 3-1 measuring dim ensions for drawing patterns e. g dividing a canvas in half or into four requires an overall measurement and then divided by 2 for half or 4 for quarters and so on. English, in art learners have to read to understand e. g study of an artist , YP read a biography of the artist and pick out relevant key points and write them down, so using sentence formation , punctuation . listening is a skill , to follow instructions in art either verbally or from a list which is used in making a clay pot , or plaster mould. †¢ ICT in art , learners use ict to find images , so using a google search , also knowing their way around a website to find relevant images or information.Usually images are printed and formatted to their specifications for tasks , so printing knowledge is used also saving work to relevant files are all everyday ict skills we use in day to day life and work How functional skills are implemented and supported in my organisation We are a small education setting with up to 30 YP at any time so I think we have a thorough pathway for YP Learners are assessed when they arrive at Aycliffe before entering education by the online goal assessment which gives a clear score on maths and English ability they are broken down into separate curriculum areas e. spelling , punctuation , number sequencing, adding , subtracting so can clearly give a good assessment for extra support regarding functional skills across the curriculum The senco then highlights areas for concern and distributes Strategy sheets to teaching staff and relevant support staff these give an indication of hints and tips useful in teaching a particular identified need in a student.Provision mapping and planning sheets are used to track continual level of need and progress, In Aycliffe secure centre we also use for identified pupils a computer programme called Successmaker which is has numeracy and literacy programmes aimed at all levels this is an excellent tool to boost the attainment in functiona l skills as learners are supervised on a 1-1 basis by teaching and support staff, and Successmaker shows a clear improvement and highlights areas for extra need.In our establishment the most level of need is in reading and we use SRA reading scheme which has 4 levels and the learners are assessed and placed in appropriate groups , we also have journal reading groups which are for competent readers which concentrate on reading own material and reviewing and understanding text. We also run an individualised Life Skills Programme , through assessment YP work through a life skills programme which offers a cross curricular array of Functional / Life skills from making a bed , budgeting and shopping for a healthy meal, booking a train ticket to accessing further education in their communities.

How to Make Deep Copies in Ruby

How to Make Deep Copies in Ruby Its often necessary to make a copy of a value in Ruby. While this may seem simple, and it is for simple objects, as soon as you have to make a copy of a data structure with multiple array or hashes on the same object, you will quickly find there are many pitfalls. Objects and References To understand whats going on, lets look at some simple code. First, the assignment operator using a POD (Plain Old Data) type in Ruby. a 1b aa 1puts b Here, the assignment operator is making a copy of the value of a and assigning it to b using the assignment operator. Any changes to a wont be reflected in b. But what about something more complex? Consider this. a [1,2]b aa 3puts b.inspect Before running the above program, try to guess what the output will be and why. This is not the same as the previous example, changes made to a are reflected in b, but why? This is because the Array object is not a POD type. The assignment operator doesnt make a copy of the value, it simply copies the reference to the Array object. The a and b variables are now references to the same Array object, any changes in either variable will be seen in the other. And now you can see why copying non-trivial objects with references to other objects can be tricky. If you simply make a copy of the object, youre just copying the references to the deeper objects, so your copy is referred to as a shallow copy. What Ruby Provides: dup and clone Ruby does provide two methods for making copies of objects, including one that can be made to do deep copies. The Object#dup method will make a shallow copy of an object. To achieve this, the dup method will call the initialize_copy method of that class. What this does exactly is dependent on the class. In some classes, such as Array, it will initialize a new array with the same members as the original array. This, however, is not a deep copy. Consider the following. a [1,2]b a.dupa 3puts b.inspecta [ [1,2] ]b a.dupa[0] 3puts b.inspect What has happened here? The Array#initialize_copy method will indeed make a copy of an Array, but that copy is itself a shallow copy. If you have any other non-POD types in your array, using dup will only be a partially deep copy. It will only be as deep as the first array, any deeper arrays, hashes or other objects will only be shallow copied. There is another method worth mentioning, clone. The clone method does the same thing as dup with one important distinction: its expected that objects will override this method with one that can do deep copies. So in practice what does this mean? It means each of your classes can define a clone method that will make a deep copy of that object. It also means you have to write a clone method for each and every class you make. A Trick: Marshalling Marshalling an object is another way of saying serializing an object. In other words, turn that object into a character stream that can be written to a file that you can unmarshal or unserialize later to get the same object. This can be exploited to get a deep copy of any object. a [ [1,2] ]b Marshal.load( Marshal.dump(a) )a[0] 3puts b.inspect What has happened here? Marshal.dump creates a dump of the nested array stored in a. This dump is a binary character string intended to be stored in a file. It houses the full contents of the array, a complete deep copy. Next, Marshal.load does the opposite. It parses this binary character array and creates a completely new Array, with completely new Array elements. But this is a trick. Its inefficient, it wont work on all objects (what happens if you try to clone a network connection in this way?) and its probably not terribly fast. However, it is the easiest way to make deep copies short of custom initialize_copy or clone methods. Also, the same thing can be done with methods like to_yaml or to_xml if you have libraries loaded to support them.