Business

Each year of the course is split into two themes.

In the first-year learners will study the following areas:

Theme 1: Marketing and People

This theme covers marketing strategies and concepts such as pricing and promotion. Human Resources topics will also be covered such as recruitment, training, motivation and leadership styles.

Theme 2: Managing Business Activities

This includes finance topics such as break-even analysis, budgeting and profitability calculations as well as operations management.

In the second-year learners will study the following areas:

Theme 3: Business Decisions and Strategy

This area is assessed via a pre-issued case study focused on a specific organisation.

Theme 4: Global Business

This area covers international business – importing, exporting, trading blocs such as the EU and multinational companies.

The course is purely exam based (there is no coursework). At the end of the 2-year course, learners are assessed through three exams:

Paper 1 – Marketing, people and global business

Paper 2 – Business activities, decisions and strategy

Paper 3 – Investigating business in a competitive environment

The Business A level course aims to help learners to develop an understanding of business organisations, the market they serve and the key functions of marketing, finance, production and human resources. You will be considering business behaviour from a variety of perspectives, incorporating the interests of all stakeholders, using a problem-solving approach. You will learn how the theory applies to the real world by considering real business organisations in the news.

With an A Level in Business, you could progress to higher education, complete an apprenticeship course, work in a variety of jobs in the business sector or even start your own business.

A level Business offers opportunities for a career in business, and you will learn how to make business decisions and solve business problems. You do not need to have taken Business at GCSE level. We will start it from scratch! However, you should be able to look at an article in the business pages of a newspaper or internet site and understand some of the ideas and concepts covered, for example terms such as profits, costs, revenues etc. You won’t be expected to know all the concepts beforehand but a willingness and an enthusiasm to find out about them is vital.

Some mathematical knowledge is required but the skills required for GCSE maths are sufficient. For example, can you calculate percentage changes? Can you describe the trends in a graph?

We do not allow students to take both Economics and Business Studies.