Economics

The study of Economics at both GCSE and A ‘level can be broken down into microeconomics and macroeconomics.  Microeconomics analyses the market behaviour and interaction of individuals and firms in order to understand their decision-making and choice of resource allocation. Macroeconomics is concerned with the behaviour and performance of an economy as a whole. It focuses on the aggregate changes in the economy and focuses also on the interdependence between economies in terms of trading patterns.  The approach taken in implementing the Economics curriculum takes into consideration the need for students to be able to distinguish between microeconomic and macroeconomic concepts but equally, especially at A’Level with the synoptic focus, allow students to explore and make connections between micro and macro topics. 

Key Stage 4:

Pupils choose their GCSE options in January of Year 9 and commence their GCSE course during term 6 of Year 9.  Students follow the OCR GCSE in Economics, there are only two exam boards available for GCSE Economics.  We offer OCR as we feel that the assessment is better suited to the strengths of our students.  Both OCR papers award 25% of the 80 marks available through multiple choice questions, which our students find accessible, whereas only 12.5% of marks on the AQA papers come from multiple choice questions.  Additionally, students find the skill of evaluation quite tricky at GCSE, the OCR specification addresses this by having only 3 specific evaluation questions on each paper which are the same number of marks and are assessed in the same way, whereas AQA have two styles of evaluation questions one worth 9 marks and the other 15 marks.   The highest number of marks for a question is 6 for OCR but 15 marks for AQA, additionally the level of contextual data provided by AQA seems too much for students to be able to absorb in a 90 minute paper compared to OCR.  

The teaching of the GCSE course is structured so that pupils are firstly introduced to Microeconomic concepts during term 6 of year 9 and throughout the course of year 10.  Pupils are then taught the macroeconomic topics throughout year 11.  Pupils have 4 lessons a fortnight and are taught by one teacher, although in some cases the teacher will change between year 10 and year 11. The microeconomics unit 1 is taught first at GCSE as it provides students with a grounding in the nature of economics, the basic economic problem and supply & demand, this then allows students to embed these concepts into their long-term memory as topics taught in unit 2, such as government policy decisions and policies used to correct market failure can be linked back to these initial concepts.

Current topics taught are:

Key Stage 5:

Many students that opt to study A ‘Level Economics have already studied GCSE Economics, however there are always a small number of students who have no prior knowledge of basic economic concepts and the course is always delivered in a way that makes it accessible and challenging for all students.  At SJWMS we offer the Edexcel Economics A Specification; the main reason for this is related to the assessment. Edexcel assesses the skills of  analysis and evaluation separately, therefore students who struggle with evaluation can still score highly on questions that require this skill to be demonstrated as poor evaluation does not affect the mark awarded for the quality of their KAA.   In addition, students find market failure diagrams difficult, Edexcel’s specification means that students only have to be able to draw positive and negative externalities of consumption diagrams not both production and consumption; although production externalities diagrams are taught to the more able students.  We also prefer the Edexcel specification as it places more emphasis on Development Economics than some of the other boards, particularly AQA, which is the closest rival.  Development Economics is an important aspect of the subject for students to be aware of, particularly from an SMSCD perspective and also because Development Economics isn’t really covered in the GCSE specification.  

Throughout year 12, pupils have 10 lessons which are usually split equally between their two teachers.  Students study microeconomics in the form of theme 1; The Introduction to markets and market failure.  The UK Economy –performance and policies is the theme 2 macroeconomics content and is taught in parallel to theme 1 during the course of year 12; students have one teacher for each theme which helps to avoid confusion.  Year 13 pupils also have 10 contact lessons over a fortnight which are shared equally between two teachers. Pupils study theme 4, A global perspective for the macroeconomics element of the course and the microeconomics theme 3 element is Business behaviour and the labour market, both themes are again taught in parallel.  The course is delivered in parallel as it enables students to make links between micro and macro concepts, this is particularly important for the synoptic nature of paper 3 where students must be able to analyse and evaluate the microeconomic and macroeconomic implications of policy decisions or market changes.

Current topics taught are:

A prescribed model of teaching has been implemented in KS4, mainly because historically it has been taught by non-specialists.  Centrally created departmental resources are used across all teaching sets; each lesson at KS4 has been intricately planned and designed to ensure that all students receive a consistent diet irrelevant of teacher allocation.   All lessons across KS4 and KS5 are planned to provide students with the opportunity to practise the skills of application, analysis and evaluation and go beyond merely recounting basic knowledge.  At KS5 teachers plan their own lessons closely designed around the scheme of work and shared resources for each theme of the specification, this allows teachers to enhance their own subject knowledge and make use of their own skills and abilities in their lesson planning.  These resources incorporate real-life examples and use of numerical data, thus enabling students to build up a portfolio of appropriate examples that can be used to demonstrate contextual understanding in their examination answers.   Teachers within the department are aware of which students in their classes are designated SEND.  Seating plans are designed to account for the needs of the SEND pupils with pupils generally being seated near the front of the class/at ends of tables to allow teachers to easily and discreetly check in on these pupils during the course of a lesson. Teachers ensure that the required provisions as per the SEN register are put in place to ensure that teaching is adapted, where necessary, to ensure that SEND students are able to access the curriculum and make progress in line with their peers in their Economics lessons.  Some SEN pupils are able to work electronically on their chromebooks during lessons, lesson materials are pre-loaded to the google classroom to ensure SEND  students have access to the resources throughout the lesson.  All students in KS4, including SEND pupils have an individual copy of the OCR endorsed textbook, although no textbook is provided by the school for KS5 students, there are a number of online resources that the students are directed towards for independent study.  Teachers use their own professional judgement to set suitably challenging homework that either engages pupils in retrieval practice, builds on & reinforces lesson content covered or introduces new concepts to pupils.

Retrieval practice is embedded within the departmental schemes of work and forms the basis of the departmental approach to Literacy in relation to the remembering of key subject specific terminology .  Links are consciously made between current and previous topics and concepts are deliberately revisited to ensure that students are able to recall previous topics to ensure learning has taken place. Starter activities are often based on previous knowledge or concept recall, this is in addition to new topics often being introduced to students and students then being asked to obviously consider and think about how it relates to a previous topics studied.  Teachers within the department pay particular attention to verbal contributions made by students where key ideas or links are omitted from an answer and teachers will routinely and frequently prompt students to make reference to the key concept, encouraging students to develop their oracy skills.  The repetition of these key concepts and the links made are heard by the whole class and this helps to reinforce the importance of making links and enables students to  build schemas and retain and store the information in their long term memory.  In KS4, low stakes google quizzes are frequently used in lessons as starters or plenaries or set as homework to encourage the recall of concepts as part of student revision and to maximise retention of crucial concepts in their long-term memory.  The quizzes are designed to incorporate a variety of topics, incorporating interleaved practice; this encourages students to switch between ideas as they learn, enabling them to make links between topics and concepts more readily.  The pure nature of Economics means that key terms and concepts are regularly revisited and the deliberate interleaving of topics ensures this takes place on a regular basis. This, combined with the retrieval practice exercises that take place each lesson ensure that SEND students are able to learn and retain the key information more easily.

Literacy is an important skill within the Economics curriculum, our approach to teaching students how to remember key terminology is focused around retrieval practice as outlined above but we also teach students how to write fluent and convincing arguments in context of a given scenario as well as teach them how to demonstrate evaluative skills in their writing.  Across KS4 and KS5, we teach students to develop 3 stage chains of reasoning by incorporating BLT statements, which reminds them to use connective words such as because, leads to and therefore to join their points together to demonstrate the skills of analysis.  Students are also taught to use AJIM as part of their evaluation, which stands for “answer the question, justified judgement, it depends on and most importantly”.  Students are familiar with these concepts and use them to build their written arguments.  In addition to this, we also teach literacy by using model answers or example answers in lessons and students are asked to identify errors and suggest  improvements that could be made with justification.  

All students across all year groups sit centrally created common assessments which are sat under examination conditions at regular intervals throughout the course, in line with the school assessment policy.  The Assessments are designed to mirror the examination requirements and are marked in-line with these requirements and exam board expectations.  Pupils with SEND have their needs met effectively; extra time and other required provisions are accounted for by members of staff within the department.  Pupils receive detailed feedback on their assessment performance with extensive ebi comments for improvement being provided by teachers in line with the school assessment policy.   Extension tasks are also sometimes provided to ensure that pupils are able to embed key concepts and apply them fluently to their long-term memory but also engage with topics in different contexts.  Mock examinations are also sat by all year groups and the results of these assessments are used to help identify areas of focus for students in terms of next steps and to plan support and required intervention at crucial stages.

The co-curricular offer within the Economics department is varied.  The second in department has the responsibility to be focused on enhancing our departmental co-curricular offer.  In July 2017, year 12 visited the Bank of England, November 2016 we hosted an IEA Economics conference here at the school which was attended by year 12 and year 13 students. During the academic year 2020-2021, we also hosted two conferences/talks for our sixth-form Economics students both held virtually, one was delivered by the IEA in March and the other involved a talk from an Economics Researcher at the Bank of England in July.  Each year, students in year 12 and year 13 have the opportunity to participate in the Student Investor Competition run by the London Institute of Banking and Finance, although this unfortunately did not run in 2021-2022 but was replaced by a competition run by LIBF in 2022-2023.   Before the competition ended three years ago, we had several cohorts of year 12 students participate in the Target 2.0 Bank of England Competition, one group even won their regional final and got through to the grand final. 2021-2022 saw year 12 students compete in the IEA Budget Challenge for the first time and we have entered students every year since.  We also hosted an IEA conference for year 12/13 Economics students in March 2023 where students attended lectures on the economics of football & the gender pay gap.  2023 saw the first Economics Olympiad, all year 12 Economics students competed in the first round, a number of students got through to round two and 9 of the 20 national finalists came from the Maths school, out of more than 3500 entrants.  In 2023 year 12 students visited a local winery where they learnt about productivity and the importance of costs and revenues.  In Term 6 of 2024, year 12 students were able to visit the Bloomberg facility at Canterbury Christ Church university. This is a dedicated trading room which provides a simulation of what it’s like to work on a real trading floor in the financial district.  In 2024/25 we hosted Damian Pudner from the IEA who spoke to our year 12 students regarding monetary policy and recent high inflation.  At the end of term 3 2025 we were fortunate to hear about the Economics of Climate Change from Lord Peter Lilley, a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. In October 2025, we hosted an IEA conference for our year 12 students which focused on the Economics of Football, which was well received by students.