Curriculum - Business Studies

Intent

Our aim is to create enthusiastic students who have a broad, detailed and rich knowledge of business and economic theory and thus will have the motivation and knowledge to succeed in their chosen career paths.

In KS4 we aim to engage and inspire students, which reflects the demands of a truly modern and evolving business environment, allowing students to develop as commercially minded and enterprising individuals which will help them to succeed in their chosen pathway. The engaging themes taught at GCSE will spark our students’ imagination and inspire commercial thinking as they develop their business knowledge. We use contemporary business contexts in our teaching, which enables engagement and extensive learning in the classroom.

Implementation

Students will:

• know and understand business concepts, business terminology, business objectives, the integrated nature of business activity and the impact of business on individuals and wider society
• apply knowledge and understanding to contemporary business issues and to different types and sizes of businesses in local, national and global contexts
• develop as enterprising individuals with the ability to think commercially and creatively to demonstrate business acumen, and draw on evidence to make informed business decisions and solve business problems
• develop as effective and independent students, and as critical and reflective thinkers with enquiring minds
• use an enquiring, critical approach to make informed judgements
• investigate and analyse real business opportunities and issues to construct well- argued, well-evidenced, balanced and structured arguments, demonstrating their depth and breadth of understanding of business
• develop the ability to use contextual data in case studies
• develop and apply quantitative skills relevant to business, including using and interpreting data

Extra-Curricular/Cultural Capital activities at RET schools

• Young enterprise programme
• Joint business and history trip to Berlin
• Accountancy competition
• Bring in local businesses to talk about marketing
• Build a business activity to apply to unit 1 of GCSE
• Stock exchange enrichment day

Relationship to the wider KS3 curriculum

Students will need the following abilities, largely from their core mathematics and English learning:

• calculate percentages, interpret graphs and use formulae
• comprehension skills including interpretation and understanding of texts
• extracting useful information and summarising it in written form.

Links to KS5

There are a range of business-related courses that students can go on to study in KS5. These include A levels in economics and business studies and Level 3 BTECs. There will also be T levels in 2021 for digital business service and in 2022 for finance and, separately, accounting. At RET schools there are the following KS5 options:

Economics A level

At BKS, our Economics students should:

• Be able to analyse and evaluate economics problems
• Be able to test, predict and evaluate a range of economics problems by appreciating and questioning the under lying key assumptions
• Should engage within the economy as it happens
• Engage and have opinions on the choices made by the 3 economics agents
• Be politically informed
• Understand how behavioural economics impacts political and social decisions undertaken by economic agents and identify the rationale behind this decision making process
• Critical of individual decisions and be tolerant of the different perspectives.

This is a varied subject that opens the doors of opportunity for all students, regardless of their backgrounds by providing an inclusive economic programme. Our students are as much involved in our classrooms as they outside of the classroom. We strive to encourage engage with the economic environment through various competitions, talks and clubs such as the Student Investor Challenge, the RES Essay Competition and having regular various talks from industry experts. We strive to build lifelong learners that take away from the classroom their knowledge and their thirst for knowledge and use it in their lives practically by challenging social norms.

BTEC Business Level 3 National Extended Certificate in Business

As a department we endorse the school’s culture of preparing our students to be tomorrow’s citizens, equipped and able to be successful at anytime, anywhere, any place and to become independent life-long learners. In business we aim to enable every pupil to leave school with an awareness of businesses and the way in which they work. Students are aware of the businesses they currently interact with have how they will continue post education. The aim of business is to find enjoyment within the subject at KS4; exiting students about businesspersons and identifying key qualities in them that can be found in the entrepreneurs of today. Seeing entrepreneurs like Lord Alan Sugar and Elon Musk can inspire the future generations as well as having enrichment activities through the Tycoon and Tenner challenge can really show a student’s eye for entrepreneurship. Our curriculum allows students to develop their ideas and to encourage the tycoons of tomorrow.  

At KS5 our students have the opportunity to explore concepts in more depth, using theorists and models to strengthen their work. This will enable students to not only gain vital business knowledge but transferable skills, such as financial capability, that can be adaptable and open doors of opportunity either through reading a degree in business, a business apprenticeship or in employment. 

Our curriculum contextualises learning using real-life situations and problem-solving scenarios, such as cash flow forecasts issues, which allows our students to be curious around business and develop into well rounded individuals that have the skill set to tackle any scenarios. Our students develop personal qualities such as interview skills, the ability to work effectively in teams, be more independent learners which are huge assets to have when perusing higher and further educational opportunities. All these skills and qualities allow our students to explore more entrepreneurial opportunities and lead to individuals that have grown and matured to achieve excellence.