Business studies

Students are encouraged to use previous experiences to inform their learning in business. The subjects included in business studies aim to highlight the opportunities that exist, and to furnish students with the capacity to enjoy these opportunities. The successfully entrepreneurial business world is notoriously non-academic (although every great business leader has returned to education to capitalise on their intuitions), and the business curriculum at The Leigh acknowledges diverse voices and approaches to achieving business success. We will enable all students to reach their potential by building on their existing strengths. Learners in business will feel confident to share ideas and to take risks in the safe environment of the classroom, knowing that staff and peers share their ambition of high grades and competency in business studies.

Students work towards 2 x 90min Exams at the end of year 11. The classwork undertaken by students covers 6 topics with teacher-led activities, peer work and group presentations. Digital materials via Google Classroom, Seneca, YouTube and Bitesize are used to flip learning and support classroom activities.

During the 2 year course, students explore 6 topic areas:

• Business in the real world,
• External influences,
• Business Operations,
• Human Resources,
• Marketing,
• Finance

Our curriculum will include well-planned opportunities to retrieve essential knowledge and master its application. After every summative assessment, we carry out feedback lessons planned around the specific gaps in knowledge that need filling for each class. Furthermore, students are encouraged to master the core knowledge gained from year 10, this is done through Do Now tasks which are made up of interleaving questions at the beginning of each lesson, as well as low stakes quizzes during the unit before the main assessment. Students revisit knowledge not only in a current unit, but in other units as well to keep knowledge embedded. Appropriate placement is critical to teaching mastery. If students are placed in material that’s too difficult for them, the amount that students must learn is much greater than 10-15% of a lesson. They cannot master the material in a single day when there is too much that they do not yet know. In Business Studies, pupils follow a four-part model which aims to break down the teaching of new content by building and exercising previous learning over the two years with a variety of skills through group work, individual presentations, and business projects

The Business Studies curriculum at  LSA is designed to spark pupils’ imagination and inspire commercial thinking as they develop their business knowledge through this challenging yet rewarding course. Our teaching focuses on contemporary business context, marrying the theory and practical aspect of business and enterprise to engage students inside and outside the classroom. The department seeks to enable strong performances in both comprehension and analytical skills through the examination of case studies and current affairs with the aim of moulding astute and aware young adults. Students will learn to study and deduce information from a range of written and non-verbal sources and apply this to business ideas, themes, and contexts. Throughout their journey in the Business Studies department, pupils will be engrossed in a challenging yet rewarding curriculum that will change the way they perceive the world and will prepare them for the challenges ahead in adulthood.