The Team

Introduction to the Department

In the Business and Vocational Department, we aim to tailor to individual learning needs. With a varied number of courses and styles of learning, we aim to match the student’s skills, academic abilities and professional targets to the courses they choose.

Key Stage 4 Information

In addition to the range of courses that we offer, all courses have an element of enterprise to encourage all students to add a business context to their studies. This is carried out via various enterprise activities and professional qualifications during the duration of their courses.

Courses offered:

• AQA GCSE Business Studies
• Edexcel BTEC Tech Award Enterprise
• Edexcel BTEC Tech Award Health and Social Care
• Certificate of Personal Effectiveness (CoPE)

GCSE Business Studies

In Years 10 and 11, students who opt to take GCSE Business have five lessons each fortnight.

Students will study the following units:

• Business in the real world – How do businesses start? Why do they decide to sell and where do they decide to do it?
• Influences on business – How different stakeholders can influence business in its decision making?
• Business operations – How do businesses decide the method with which to produce products? How do they keep an eye on the amount produced and the consistence of quality? Do they produce in the UK or go elsewhere?
• Human resources – How do businesses recruit the right people? How do they keep them motivated and how do they pay them or get rid of them?
• Marketing – How do businesses increase the sales of your product? How do businesses research the market, find a market and persuade their market to buy from them and not the competition?
• Finance – Where do businesses get their money from to start up, expand, pay their staff and buy resources? What happens if they run out of money?

Assessment will be via two 1 hour 45 min papers with 50% weighting each (there is no coursework element to this subject).

The exam board is AQA.

Further information:  

http://www.aqa.org.uk/subjects/business-subjects/gcse/business-8132/specification-at-a-glance

BTEC TECH Award: Business Enterprise

Students who opt for Business Enterprise will take the BTEC Tech Award and have five lessons each fortnight.

Students will study the following units:

Component 1 – Exploring Enterprise: Controlled Assessment Summer Year 10

Component 2 – Planning and Pitching an Enterprise Activity: Controlled Assessment Spring Year 11

Component 3 – Promotion and Finance for Enterprise: External Exam Summer Year 11

This is an exciting and challenging course. It will help to prepare you for an enterprising future by studying and practising knowledge, behaviours and skills related to researching, planning, pitching and reviewing an enterprise. It will enable you to develop your technical skills, such as market research, planning, promotion and finance – using realistic work scenarios and personal skills – such as monitoring your own performance, time management and problem solving – through a practical and skills based approach to learning and assessment. All businesses need enterprising leaders and employees to drive their organisations forward to have ideas and initiatives to promote growth, and to ensure that businesses survive in this fast changing world.

CoPE

The Certificate of Personal Effectiveness (CoPE) is a nationally recognised qualification outcome of the ASDAN programmes. The qualifications offer imaginative ways of accrediting young people's activities. They promote, and allow centres to record, a wide range of personal qualities, abilities and achievements of young people, as well as introducing them to new activities and challenges.

Students who opt for CoPE will receive five lessons each fortnight.

Students will study the following units:

Year 10

• Developing myself and my performance
• Working with others
• Problem solving

Year 11

• Developing a project

Candidates must complete all units to achieve the qualification. Candidates who do not achieve the full qualification requirements of four units will receive certification for those units which they have successfully completed.

Completion of the qualification involves three main strands:

• Taking responsibility for planning, organising and carrying out a number of activities, or challenges, and evidencing this work in a portfolio.
• Developing and evidencing the skills represented by the CoPE assessment units.
• Completing skill-specific evidence records using ASDAN documentation.

For more information:

http://www.asdan.org.uk/courses/qualifications/certificate-of-personal-effectiveness-level-1-and-2