At Stoke High School, our aim is to help students understand and engage with the increasingly complex business world in which we live. We strive to enable students to become informed and confident consumers, employees and entrepreneurs.
Ipswich is a community with many opportunities for SME start-ups and less employment opportunities with PLCs. Therefore, we feel it is essential that students understand the fundamentals of starting their own business venture, as for many who chose to live in the community post-18, becoming self-employed is highly likely.
With this in mind, we focus on the key areas of business as laid out in the OCR specification for GCSE, linking it to real-life examples and businesses in the world around us. We explore how each part of the specification links to a business plan. Lessons are designed to give students the opportunity to explore real business issues and to understand how businesses work.
Pupils will gain a holistic understanding of business in a range of contexts. They will also develop a critical understanding of organisations and their ability to meet society’s needs and wants, considering humanity and kindness. This will lead students to generate and embrace enterprising and creative approaches to business opportunities, problems and issues, while being aware of the ethical dilemmas and responsibilities faced by organisations and individuals.
Business Studies is the past, the present and the future. By incorporating skill sets from every department (from Maths and English, through to History and Psychology), Business Studies prepares students well for their post-16 options. This includes enabling students to pursue a Business or Business-related degree route, as well as developing students’ entrepreneurial and critical-thinking skills for the future. Throughout the Business curriculum we interleave the learning and weave the theory of topics into one another, just as in the real world of business, where functional areas are dependent on one another. Our aim is that all students on this course access and engage with the world of business, linking theory from the topics, analysing the usefulness of concepts, and making informed recommendations to solve business problems.