Throughout my career I have been blessed to work with some very talented and hardworking colleagues. This year it was a real joy to collaborate with Blanchelande’s Head of Business Studies on an inquiry project for her Y11 GCSE lunchtime revision club. She came to me towards the end of the summer term to discuss how to use FOSIL to support an enterprise activity she was doing with Y11, and between us we planned a (semi-compulsory) 30 minute lunchtime revision club to run over the whole of the winter term that would revisit a range of concepts from the GCSE specification in a structured way whilst working towards a practical outcome as the students set up and ran small money making enterprise projects towards the end of term.
Teams were given a small initial loan of £30 (that needed to be paid back from their revenue), and then half the profit they made went to charity, while the other half funded prizes for the most successful teams (in this instance, the most profitable, the best presentation and the best company report).
I went through the spec and suggested which concepts we should revise in what order to help step students through an inquiry process that would prepare them to run their businesses (initial draft plan attached below). We then discussed and refined this together and the Head of Business produced revision resources for each session, alongside resources to help them to plan their business. The activity ran for around ten weeks, culminating in two weeks of trading followed by presentations and business reports to the school Vice-Principal (now Principal) and Bursar.
The two Business Studies teachers ran the activity between them, so I only attended one session (lunchtimes are busy in the Library!) but I was also delighted to be on the final judging panel. Engagement was high (and trading fiercely competitive) and it is clear that the students both learnt some important practical lessons and also revisited a wide range of the Y10 material they will need for their GCSE exam. With mock exams now underway, the intention is to analyse the results to see if we can measure the effect of the inquiry on exam performance.
Over the coming weeks I hope that the Head of Business (who ran a super INSET session in our January INSET about this inquiry) will also offer her reflections on this forum, and perhaps also some of the excellent resources she produced, but from my perspective this was a very successful inquiry that clearly demonstrated (as we have before at A-level) that inquiry still has a place in the public exam years (A-level Politics essay planning and pressure groups, and A-level Economics Behavioural Economics and Dismal Science to name two subjects that made it to this forum).
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