Applied Business – Key Stage 5

We believe that the teaching and learning of Business and Economics subjects can play a vital role in the development of a student’s personal, social, intellectual and cultural skills set, and that these subjects can lead to the acquisition of skills that are important and relevant on a personal, household, local, national, pan-European and increasingly global scale.

As teachers of Business and Economics, we feel that we have the potential to play a significant role in the moral and spiritual education of the young people that we engage with, as they begin to assemble the knowledge, skills and attributes required to thrive and hopefully prosper as producer-consumer-citizens of the ever more complex world of the future.

There is a lot at stake for the planet that we inhabit over the coming decades, and as teachers in these subject areas, we are acutely aware of the need to promote an understanding of the appropriate moral and ethical standards required of us all, if we are to ensure sustainability and security for people against the back-drop of the demands of the market economy and in the face of scarce resources. We seek to remind our learners how, whilst profit is very much at the heart of the business model, it cannot be seen as the only goal that should be sought, and how unquestioning pursuit of economic growth on the part of producers and governments, and the acquisitive lifestyle choices pursued by individuals, might actually be seen as underpinning many of the problems that we face today.

We seek to instil a spirit of enquiry and inquisitiveness in our learners, in the hope that they will rise to the challenge of questioning and doubting the accepted paradigms that their lives continually confront them with. For their part they must embrace the challenge of becoming good, independent learners, taking responsibility for their learning, and taking their own learning beyond the classroom, and in so doing, creating learning communities of their own making, through regular and active interactions, engagement and discussions with not only their teachers, but also their friends, their peers and their families, all of whom are, without necessarily being explicitly aware of it, living this subject area day-to day, and are an invaluable source of experience, insight and stimulation.

We seek to promote cross-curricular links with other subject areas in our day-to-day teaching wherever this is relevant and possible, and in doing so, celebrate the inter-connectedness of the learning that we seek to establish – our most obvious academic partners found (but not exclusively so) in subjects like Geography, History, Psychology, Modern Foreign Languages and of course English Literature, English language and Maths.