The Business A level course at Ashford School seeks to provide our students with an entrepreneurial skill set that we hope will enable them either to be creative and innovative employees, or run their own business in the future.
The course provides a solid foundation in the four crucial functional areas of business: finance, marketing, human resource management and logistics. In addition, students study the effects of external factors such as the state of the economy, government policy, technology, ethics, and environmental concerns upon business performance, giving the students a moral as well as a profit-driven focus.
All of the business theory that we study is applied to actual businesses of varying size and scale, so that the students’ experience of the subject is as real as possible. To this end we visit local businesses such as the Shepherd Neame brewery in Faversham, where the pupils can experience first-hand the marketing and production ideas that they learn in the classroom. Students also attend conferences where they can share their business knowledge with peers from other schools.
Running alongside the A level course we offer the students the chance to participate in the Young Enterprise nationwide scheme, which offers Sixth Formers the chance to set up and run their own business, choosing their very own product and manufacturing and marketing it themselves. This is an excellent opportunity for Business students (as well as those from other subject disciplines) to put their business theory into practice, and Ashford School companies have regularly been successful in Kent inter-school competitions.
We are delighted that so many of our students go on to pursue Business-related degree courses at university.