Economics & Business Studies Activities

Economics Film Club
Economics Film Club gives A2 students the opportunity to watch full length feature films with a strong economic, social, political or business content. Students are able to appreciate advanced economic concepts in fictional though realistic settings and to discuss and answer follow-up questions which enhance their learning as well as being very enjoyable.  Favourites include Rogue Trader (bringing down Barings Bank), The China Syndrome (nuclear melt-down, negative externalities and business corruption), Blood Diamond (development economics, exploitation, African issues), Wall Street (‘Greed is Good’) and Erin Brockovich (negative externalities, legal argument and remedy).

EyeWitness and BizEyeWitness
These two newspapers allow Year 12 students the chance to ‘publish’ their own monthly journal of economics and business articles. The editorship changes each month by election and editors have the overall task of collecting contributions from their peers for selection, presentation and production of the issue. Articles using professional pieces have an in-house comment or synopsis attached which builds on girls’ learning and application of economic and business theories. Favourite pieces include commentaries, cartoons, crosswords, graphics and word search.

Investment Challenge
The Investment Challenge is open to all Year 12 Economics students. Students create an investment portfolio, investing £50,000 in no more than eight companies. Share prices are investigated, selected and then monitored.

At the end of the ‘challenge’, teams must make a presentation which will be judged on the reasons why shares are selected, how well prices were monitored, and the quality of the presentation using ICT, graphs, spreadsheets etc.

The winning team will be a combination of quality of research, presentation as well as the final portfolio value.

Shares4Schools
For the second year in 2010 we have entered a team of five Year 12 students in the Shares4schools competition run by the Share Centre. Each team starts with £1,500 of real money which they have to invest in shares on the London Stock Market. The competition runs from October to June and schools are placed on a national league table depending on the performance of their shares on the stock market.