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The UK's International Trading Position - Lesson Plan: 2 x 1 hour lessons

A series of 'off the shelf' lesson plans and resources for use in the classroom. These lessons deal with the UK's International Trading Position and are relevant to the following specifications:

• AQA: Module 6, 15.4
• Edexcel: Unit 6
• OCR: Module 2887, 2888

Aim

The aim of these lessons is to encourage students to look in some detail at the UK's international trading position and to conduct some analysis on the main trends in UK trade with the rest of the world and seek some explanations for those trends. Inherent in the analysis will be some consideration of the policies that could be adopted by the government to help promote and improve the competitiveness of the UK economy.

The format of the lessons is straightforward. The Presentation and Mind Map offer a brief overview of the main issues relating to international trade. The Activity is focused on some selected data from the Pink Book 2004 to enable students to conduct some data analysis using spreadsheets. The spreadsheet data can be charted to help provide a more visual representation but students should also be encouraged to conduct some simple numerical calculations by identifying rates of change and changing proportions of trade with different regions of the world.

Having carried out some of this number crunching, the student is then expected to offer some explanations for the trends they identify and to consider some of the policy solutions that might help the UK boost its international competitiveness.

Learning Objectives:

At the end of the lessons, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate an increasing confidence in manipulating data and applying basic numerical techniques to identify trends from data sets
• Show some evidence of being able to identify trends suggested by the datasets
• Show some key skills in working with spreadsheets - applying formulas, charting information appropriately, etc.
• Identify some key factors causing the changes and trends
• Suggest some policy options to influence those trends and offer some evaluation of the extent to which such policies would work

Resources

• PowerPoint Presentation - UK Trading Position [177 KB] (basic version also available for quicker download [169 KB])
• Mind Map - The UK's International Trading Position
• Activity - The UK's International Trading Position
• Spreadsheet - provides information on UK exports and imports, 1993-2003
• PCs with Excel to conduct spreadsheet activities
• PC and digital projector

Lesson Structure

Lesson 1

1. Begin the session by asking students to consider the types of goods and services they think will form part of the UK's trade pattern. (10 minutes)
2. Introduce the Presentation and link the students' responses in 1. above to the broad categories used by the Office for National Statistics in the Pink Book (Further details on classification can be gained from the United Nations Statistics Division.) (20 minutes)
3. Introduce the Activity, explain the learning outcomes and set students on task. (25 minutes)
4. Review main outcomes of lesson and remind students of the task for the next lesson. (5 minutes)

Lesson 2

1. Remind students of the nature of the task in the Activity and deal with any questions arising from the last lesson. (5 minutes)
2. Set students on task. (35 minutes)
3. Bring students together to identify the main trends and the main factors influencing international competitiveness and how policy can be directed to improving the international competitiveness of the UK. (20 minutes)

Extension work

Students could be encouraged to look in more detail at the Pink Book 2004 and identify the changing patterns of trade in more detail between regions and of different categories of trade in goods and services, for example, the trade in 'transportation' covers a wide range of different trading areas that could help build students' awareness of the complexity of the issues in trade.