Curriculum

Our mission is to use the curriculum to develop our students’ knowledge, skills and qualities required to enhance their professional and personal wellbeing through a career or through enterprise. We inspire our students to be entrepreneurial and take calculated risks in their decision making in order to reach their potential in both local and global contexts.

Students will build their knowledge of key business functions, such as finance, marketing, human resources as well as more strategic areas, such as how to grow a business internationally or making decisions in response to a changing political and economic landscape. Business is a subject that requires creativity and an ability to apply what has been learnt to real life contexts. Business decisions are often open-ended; there may be more than one way of approaching problems with the specific business context having a significant impact. Students therefore will need to use critical thinking to investigate, analyse and interpret results in order to draw balanced conclusions. 

The Business pillars are central to all our teaching and referred to in every lesson, enabling students to link new learning to what they already know and can do. This allows the students to recognise explicitly the purpose of what they are learning and to build the meta-cognition on how their skills and knowledge is being developed over time.

Students can choose GCSE Business (Edexcel) as an option at the end of Year 9 and A-Level Business (Edexcel) or Business BTEC National Extended Diploma Level 3 (Pearson) in Year 12. The Business Studies Curriculum at Ashmole Academy is underpinned by five subject specific curriculum pillars:

Extra-curricular

The Business Department is always looking for external speakers to come into school to help the students more effectively apply what they have learnt and to connect it to careers or enterprise. In KS5 we also offer a Business Scholar program where the students can develop their own business idea into a business plan that they have ensured is a viable proposition that could be presented to seek external finance.