Business
Business is the exploration of organisations, markets, economies and the factors the impact upon these things, which cause them to shift and change. Business students will explore the internal functional areas of the business and the many careers they offer as well as the ever-changing external environment landscape that organisations must wade through in order to develop and hone their strategies. Business students must be able to process and extrapolate information from various sources of information in order to gather evidence to base their analytical opinions upon. They must use their evaluation skills to come to conclusions and make recommendations for organisations to follow from a strategic position point of view.
Business gives students an awareness of the different tasks and roles performed by each part of an organization depending on size and industry, this awareness is underpinned by an exploration of current affairs where business students will be expected to form and put forward their opinions to others in both verbal and written form to create cohesive arguments. This understanding of current affairs will allow the students to access the different ‘reasons’ for choice of business strategy at varying points in business history as well as assess the merits and failures of these particular choices.
The business curriculum at HACH aims to create critical thinkers who are able to use unfamiliar circumstances and an abundance of data and information to assess a business's current position, analyse the drawbacks and benefits of this position and make recommendations for future strategies. Business students at HACH should be able to access current affairs and form a business opinion and communicate this with accuracy.
Year by Year Synopsis
In year 10 business students are taught the underpinning ‘basics’ of the curriculum which they must be able to grasp in order to access future topics. This includes and exploration of why businesses start in the first place and the skills required by an entrepreneur in order to bring the factors of production to together and create a successful business that fills a gap in the market. From here students explore various other factors such as the choice of ownership model chosen by businesses and the importance of key stakeholders than businesses must take into consideration. Lastly, students must come to terms with the concept of profit and how this is calculated as it is the lifeblood of any firm.
From here students must learn about the ‘external’ environment that businesses operate within; this topic is taught in year 10 but is constantly built upon from there out. Students about political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental factors that are constantly at war with firms. Once these two units of learning are complete students move through to look at the internal functional areas of the business, specifically human resources and operations. Students are given a grasp of how and why organisations hire, and fire employees then move to how they make and keep them productive whilst trying to keep them happy and motivated. The curriculum then moves onto how products and services are made and delivered, the importance of quality for certain organisations and how this is maintained even as the external factors put pressure on businesses. Lastly, the curriculum ties all of these units of work together to allow students to think hard about how the external environment puts consistent issues in the way of businesses when they are trying to make HR and OPs decisions.
In Year 11 business we continue to build on the year 10 curriculum by looking at the finance and marketing functional areas. Students must learn about how businesses fund start up and expansion strategies, manage cashflows and measure profitability. The curriculum then looks to how businesses carry out research, create marketing plans and present the best levels of customer service for their customers. Once all 4 functional areas have been taught over the two years the curriculum once again brings these concepts together and allows students to think deep about how all 4 areas work together to create strategies to outwit competition and overcome the constant pressures of the external environment.
In Year 12 business students are once again faced with the underpinning knowledge of why businesses start in the first place but with a much larger emphasis on mission statements and corporate objectives, ownership styles are expanded upon with the addition of mutual businesses and conversations about market capitalization and the external environment is also enhanced with a much deeper look into the concepts of short termism and the PESTLE factors. From here the curriculum splits to simultaneously look at leadership styles and decision making tools for businesses as well as an immediate look into finance for business. Students take a deeper dive into the relationship between cashflow and profit which is linked to decision making and how managers/leaders are able to complete strategies with limited funds and budgets even in extremely profitable companies. The curriculum moves onto a look into major theorists around worker motivation as well as the use of financial tools to analyse profitability, cashflow and capital structure objectives. Lastly in year 12 students learn about the extended marketing mix (The 7p’s) and how this marketing plan is underpinned by the work carried out by the operations department with the introduction of measurement metrics such as capacity utilisation and defect rates. At the end of year 12 the curriculum once again brings all of the internal functional areas together to demonstrate how the entire firm has to work towards one main goal in order to overcome the pressures from the external environment.
In Year 13 students begin to look at tools they can use to analyse the strategic position of a business such as SWOT analysis, Financial Ratio analysis, the Ansoff Matric and Porter’s Generic Strategies. Meanwhile they take a further dive into the external environment with addition of concepts such as fiscal and monetary government policies, protectionist legislation, globalisation and the strategies presented by Barlett and Ghoshal. The aim of this portion of the curriculum is to allow students to be able to see where a business currently ‘is’ in relation to the external landscape, make a judgement about the current successes of the businesses strategies and then present a potentially new and better approach. Students finish year 13 with an exploration of business culture, including the works of Hofstede and Handy, as well as the potential problems of any strategy such as strategic drift and Greiners model of growth. At the end of year 13 students are able to being together the 4 functional areas, analyse them, identify the external pressure factors and then recommend the best strategies moving forward with a critical evaluation of the potential pitfalls ahead.
