Business Studies
At La Retraite, we aim to provide a Business Studies curriculum that supports the school Catholic ethos and allows each student to develop as a whole person with a sense of identity.
The vision for our department is to develop students’ understanding of how the local/national/global economy works through analysing economic issues, problems and institutions that affect everyday life.
Our Business Studies curriculum takes every opportunity to build on previous key stage, ensuring that students have an opportunity to proficient key-concepts, through silent starters, develop their subject knowledge and prepare for the next stage. As a 2020 T Level provider in the sixth form, we constantly encourage and challenged student to work collaboratively and think independently when engaging in all lessons and class debates preparing them for the workplace as this allows students to express themselves in a confident manner.
Our students studying business will develop a range of life skills including enhancing team working, problem solving, independent learning and communication skills whilst instilling confidence in our students to make themselves stand out in a competitive working environment. Students takes proactive part in their studies by maintaining a good understanding of current affairs and applying this to their studies on the impact of the external environment on business. The Business Studies curriculum also nurtures their creative side in developing marketing and promotional campaigns, planning and pitching business ideas whilst also developing their financial acumen when it comes to understanding personal finance in the form of mortgages, lending, savings, and investments.
We believe that at La Retraite, Business Studies is a living and breathing subject and therefore as a department we must engage with employers so that we remain pro-active in our subject area. We have successfully partnered with City of London Brokerage which focuses on inner London boroughs, raising the awareness and aspirations of young people like our students to career opportunities in the City and Docklands areas. They also support and encourages employers in recruiting from the local workforce, particularly individuals from more diverse or disadvantaged backgrounds like ours.
As a girl's school, only 1 in 3 UK entrepreneurs is female a gender gap equivalent to 1.1 million missing businesses. (Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship, HM Treasury 2019). In 2017, only 5.6% of UK women run their own businesses, compared to 15% of women in Canada, almost 11% of women in the US, and over 9% of women in Australia and the Netherlands. We have considered our student’s demography as there have been growth of BME women entrepreneurs in London especially. Over the past decade, there has been major growth in the number of businesses owned and managed by women from the different BME communities; and they are making an increasingly important contribution to London’s economy, which is supported by our curriculum.
A challenge we face is students Cultural Capital which we try to embed in our teaching by constantly introducing our students to a wide variety of viewpoints from some of the most influential BME entrepreneurs like Oprah Winfrey and Aiko Dangote. We investigate the impact that their work has had on the world we live in, and students are encouraged to make links between their studies and real-life examples.