Computing & Business

“Creating informed and discerning citizens prepared for life in modern Britain”

In the Computing and Business faculty we strive to provide every opportunity possible for developing our students and ensuring that they are ready for whatever steps they will take in their future.  Aware that our learners follow a wide variety of routes when they leave us, we offer a broad and balanced curriculum at Key Stage 4 comprising of academic and vocational qualifications alongside a Key Stage 3 Computing curriculum that prepares students for these different routes.  Student outcomes in the faculty continue to follow an upward trend; a number of courses often outperform national figures for both overall results and subsets of students.

The current courses being offered by the Computing and Business faculty are:

• Key Stage 3 Computing
• GCSE Business (Edexcel)
• GCSE Computer Science (OCR)
• GCSE Economics (OCR)
• BTEC Technical Award Business and Enterprise
• BTEC Technical Award Health and Social Care
• BTEC First Award Children’s Play Learning and Development
• BTEC First Award Travel and Tourism
• OCR Award Creative iMedia
• City and Guilds Technical Award Digital Technologies

Teaching Learning and Assessment in the Computing and Business Faculty

All of the courses in the faculty are implemented via careful sequencing of lessons using spaced practice and interleaving of content to promote long term learning through retrieval practice.  Course leaders have carefully planned effective assessments to enable teachers to make inferences about the deep learning that is happening; so we are not simply judging short term performance.  The assessments students complete support the development of the required examination skills alongside a deep understanding of the subject content.  These carefully designed diagnostic assessments inform responsive teaching in the classroom and also serve as great opportunities for students to practice knowledge recall and strengthen their knowledge of key subject matter.  Content is delivered in small learning blocks to enable students to commit new information to their long term memory, enabling them to use and build on this information in future lessons. 

This process of developing long term learning increases students’ fluency, freeing up working memory so that they can successfully connect and apply these facts to a range of diverse contexts. Within day to day teaching, staff utilise opportunities for low stakes quizzing to promote knowledge recall, together with elaboration to deepen students’ knowledge of why specific knowledge is important in the wider world, rather than just having to remember a series of unconnected facts.