Human Resource Objectives (AQA A Level Business): Exam Questions

Source A: Timpson Group

Timpson Group is one of the largest service retailers in the United Kingdom and Ireland. It repairs shoes, cuts keys, mends watches, cleans clothes and prints photographs, trading as Timpson, Max Spielmann, Snappy Snaps, Johnsons, The Watch Lab, Jeeves, Timpson Security and Barbershop. It has been a family business since 1865 and is now run by the sixth generation of Timpsons.

In the 52 weeks to 27 September 2025 sales rose 5.6% to £367 million, from £347 million, the fourth year in a row of record sales. Key cutting alone took £101 million. Watch repair now brings in more than twice as much as shoe repair, the service the company was built on.

The way Timpson Group is run is unusual, and it is deliberate. The company picks colleagues for their personality and then trusts them to do the job their way. It calls this Upside Down Management. John Timpson puts it like this: "The best way to run a business is to trust your colleagues with the freedom to do their job in the way they know best." Colleagues in the shops make decisions that in most retailers would be taken at head office.

Where those colleagues come from is unusual too. After visiting a prison in 2002 and hiring a young man named Matt, Timpson Group has become one of the largest employers of ex-offenders in the United Kingdom. Over 12% of its 4 500+ colleagues have a past criminal conviction. The Timpson Foundation spends over £1 million a year supporting the employment of people from prison, and runs training academies inside prisons so that prisoners learn the shop services before they are released. Some colleagues work on day release while still serving a sentence. The Foundation also recruits care leavers and people leaving the armed forces.

The company says the approach works on its own terms: 75% of the ex-offenders it recruits stay with the business long term, and it describes them as loyal, hardworking colleagues.

Source: Timpson Group, 2026; The Times, 23 September 2026

Appendix A: Timpson Group selected data

Source: Timpson Group and The Times

Appendix D: Timpson Group colleague movements, year to 27 September 2025

Source: Analyst

Assess the importance of employee retention as a human resource objective for Timpson Group.

Source A: Compass Group

Compass Group is the largest contract catering business in the world. It does not own restaurants. Instead it is hired by other organisations (offices, hospitals, schools, universities, factories, prisons, sports grounds and oil platforms) to run their canteens and cafés for them. If it loses a contract, the client usually keeps the kitchen and hires someone else to work in it.

It is enormous. In the year to September 2025 it had revenue of $46.1 billion, up 9.7%, and it employed over 590 000 people. Organic revenue grew 8.7%, made up of 4.5% from winning new business, about 3% from higher prices and about 1% from selling more. Underlying operating profit grew 11.7% and underlying free cash flow reached $1 975 million, up 13.5%. Net new business growth stayed inside its 4% to 5% target range for the fourth year running.

Almost all of those 590 000 people are frontline: chefs, kitchen porters, counter staff and cleaners, working in someone else's building for a wage close to the legal minimum. Many are on contracts with variable hours, because a university canteen needs very different numbers in October and in July, and because a contract can end at three months' notice.

That flexibility has a price. People leave often, and every leaver has to be recruited, checked, trained in food safety and brought up to speed on a client's site. Clients notice when the faces change: the people serving lunch are the only part of Compass Group that most of its clients' employees ever see.

The business is also unusual in how it is run. A unit manager in a single hospital canteen makes decisions that in most companies of this size would go to head office, because nobody at head office knows that hospital.

Source: Compass Group annual results for the year to September 2025

Appendix A: Selected data for Compass Group, year to September 2025

Source: Compass Group

Appendix B: Compass Group's workforce in the UK and Ireland

Source: Analyst

Assess whether Compass Group's human resource objectives should focus on cost rather than on keeping its people.

Calculate Compass Group's revenue for each employee to support your answer.

Source A: Castlebrook Veterinary Group

Castlebrook Veterinary Group runs seven veterinary practices across the Midlands. It employs 95 people, of whom 30 are qualified vets, and in the year to September 2025 it had revenue of £9.4 million and an operating profit of £710 000.

It did not grow by opening practices. It grew by buying them. Four of the seven were independent practices bought in the last five years, each with its own name over the door, its own way of booking appointments and its own long-standing clients. Castlebrook kept the names.

The problem is vets. There are not enough of them in the United Kingdom, and small animal practices compete for the same small pool. Six of Castlebrook's thirty vet posts are unfilled. When a practice cannot cover a day it books a locum, a self-employed vet who works for a day rate, and that day rate has risen every year. A locum does not know the animals, cannot be booked for follow-up appointments, and will not take part in the out-of-hours rota.

How much each practice decides for itself is now under review. At present each practice manager sets their own prices, chooses their own suppliers and recruits their own staff. The group's clinical director, Marcus Oyelaran, argues that this is why the group pays four different prices for the same vaccine and why recruitment takes eleven weeks. The practice managers argue that their clients came to them, not to Castlebrook, and that a practice in a market town cannot charge what one in a city suburb charges.

Source: Castlebrook Veterinary Group

Appendix A: Castlebrook Veterinary Group selected data, year to September 2025

Source: Castlebrook Veterinary Group

Appendix C: What each practice decides, now and as proposed

Source: Castlebrook Veterinary Group

Assess whether filling all thirty vet posts should be Castlebrook Veterinary Group's most important human resource objective.

Source A: Pret A Manger

Pret A Manger sells sandwiches, salads and coffee, made fresh in the shop each morning and thrown away or given to charity at the end of the day. It has grown past 750 shops in 21 countries, of which more than 500 are in the United Kingdom, and employs about 12 500 team members.

In 2025 system sales rose 2.7% to £1.2 billion and the business made an operating profit of £37 million. In the first four months of 2026 sales rose 7% worldwide and 8% in the United Kingdom, helped by opening shops in railway stations, airports and, for the first time, a drive-through in Warrington.

The company says its growth comes from investing in training its teams so that service is faster. It runs what it calls the Pret Academy, and more than 85% of its managers started as team members on the shop floor.

That matters more at Pret than at most retailers, because the job is unusually demanding. Everything is made on site before the shop opens, the lunchtime rush is ferocious and brief, and a queue that moves slowly loses customers who have forty minutes and somewhere else to go. A new team member who has not been trained properly slows the queue down.

Shops are run by a shop manager who reports to an area manager. How much a shop manager may decide for themselves, and how many shops an area manager can realistically look after as the estate grows past 750, is now under discussion.

Source: Pret A Manger announcements, 2025 and 2026

Appendix A: Selected data for Pret A Manger

Source: Pret A Manger

Appendix B: Where Pret's managers come from, and how long people stay

Source: Analyst

Assess the value to Pret A Manger of promoting more than 85% of its managers from the shop floor.

Calculate Pret A Manger's system sales for each team member to support your answer.

Source A: Monzo

Monzo is a digital bank with no branches. In the year to 31 March 2025 revenue passed £1 billion for the first time, rising 48% to £1.2 billion, and adjusted profit before tax went from £13.9 million to £113.9 million. It now has more than 12 million customers, including about 625 000 business customers. Of the 2.4 million customers who joined during the year, more than two thirds came by word of mouth.

It grew up on an unusually open way of working. Most internal channels could be read by anybody in the company, decisions were argued out where everyone could see them, and employees were expected to say when they thought something was wrong. That was straightforward when there were a few hundred people.

There are now 5 275, a rise of 34% in a year, and more than half of them have been there under two years. The culture survey has moved with the size. The share who say they can see the decisions that affect them being made has fallen from 84% to 46%, and the share who say they can raise a concern and be heard from 88% to 63%.

Two other things have changed. Monzo is a regulated bank, so anything affecting customers' money now has to follow a formal process rather than a conversation in a channel, and some information cannot be visible to 5 275 people at all. And 61% of employees work mainly from home, across three offices, with 72% on London contracts.

The board is preparing to launch in two more countries and wants to know what it is prepared to change.

Source: Monzo Bank Limited Annual Report for the year ended 31 March 2025

Appendix B: What Monzo's people said at 1 000 employees, and what they say now

Source: Analyst

Appendix C: How Monzo is organised and where its people work

Source: Analyst

Assess how well Monzo is meeting its human resource objectives now that it employs 5 275 people.

Source A: Timpson Group

Timpson Group is one of the largest service retailers in the United Kingdom and Ireland. It repairs shoes, cuts keys, mends watches, cleans clothes and prints photographs, trading as Timpson, Max Spielmann, Snappy Snaps, Johnsons, The Watch Lab, Jeeves, Timpson Security and Barbershop. It has been a family business since 1865 and is now run by the sixth generation of Timpsons.

In the 52 weeks to 27 September 2025 sales rose 5.6% to £367 million, from £347 million, the fourth year in a row of record sales. Key cutting alone took £101 million. Watch repair now brings in more than twice as much as shoe repair, the service the company was built on.

The way Timpson Group is run is unusual, and it is deliberate. The company picks colleagues for their personality and then trusts them to do the job their way. It calls this Upside Down Management. John Timpson puts it like this: "The best way to run a business is to trust your colleagues with the freedom to do their job in the way they know best." Colleagues in the shops make decisions that in most retailers would be taken at head office.

Where those colleagues come from is unusual too. After visiting a prison in 2002 and hiring a young man named Matt, Timpson Group has become one of the largest employers of ex-offenders in the United Kingdom. Over 12% of its 4 500+ colleagues have a past criminal conviction. The Timpson Foundation spends over £1 million a year supporting the employment of people from prison, and runs training academies inside prisons so that prisoners learn the shop services before they are released. Some colleagues work on day release while still serving a sentence. The Foundation also recruits care leavers and people leaving the armed forces.

The company says the approach works on its own terms: 75% of the ex-offenders it recruits stay with the business long term, and it describes them as loyal, hardworking colleagues.

Source: Timpson Group, 2026; The Times, 23 September 2026

Appendix A: Timpson Group selected data

Source: Timpson Group and The Times

Appendix B: Timpson Group colleagues by type of contract

Source: Analyst

Appendix D: Timpson Group colleague movements, year to 27 September 2025

Source: Analyst

Evaluate two human resource objectives Timpson Group could set for the next three years and recommend which one it should choose.

Source A: BT Group

BT Group is the United Kingdom's largest telecommunications company. It builds and runs the networks that carry broadband and mobile calls, and it sells services to households, businesses and government.

In May 2023 it announced one of the largest planned workforce reductions in British corporate history. By the end of the 2030 financial year it intends to remove between 40 000 and 55 000 roles, taking its global headcount from about 130 000, a figure that includes third-party contractors, down to between 75 000 and 90 000. That is a reduction of between 31% and 42%. The company set itself a target of £3 billion of annual cost savings.

The reasoning is that the work itself is changing. BT Group has spent years digging up roads to lay fibre broadband and building its 5G mobile network. Once that build is finished the business needs far fewer people to do it. At the same time the old copper telephone network and the 3G mobile network are being switched off, so the engineers who maintain them are no longer needed. Artificial intelligence is taking over more of the call handling and network fault diagnosis that used to be done by people, and the chief executive, Allison Kirkby, has said that advances in artificial intelligence will probably deepen the cuts rather than soften them.

The plan is not simply about having fewer people. BT Group needs many more people who can write software, work with data and build artificial intelligence systems, and far fewer who can splice a copper cable. Those are not the same people, and the company cannot buy all the new skills it needs on the open market.

Its structure is also under review. Decisions that affect customers currently pass through several layers of management, and the company has said it wants to be simpler and faster.

Source: BT Group announcements, 2023 to 2026

Appendix A: BT Group's workforce plan

Source: BT Group

Appendix D: Two ways of removing 55 000 roles by 2030

Source: Analyst

BT Group is considering two ways of removing 55 000 roles by 2030:

Option 1: voluntary redundancy and early retirement

Option 2: natural wastage, redeployment and retraining

Evaluate both options and recommend which one BT Group should choose.

Calculate the total cost of removing the roles under Option 1 to support your answer.

Source A: Northvale Logistics Ltd

Northvale Logistics Ltd moves chilled and ambient food between farms, packhouses and supermarket depots across the north of England. It runs 92 lorries from two yards near Wakefield, employs 175 people and had revenue of £18.4 million in the year to March 2025, with an operating profit of £742 000.

Its problem is people, not vehicles. Northvale has 23 driver vacancies it cannot fill. In a bad week eleven lorries stand in the yard because nobody is licensed to drive them, and the work is passed to a subcontractor at a rate that leaves Northvale with nothing. The average driver is 51 years old and well over a third are past 55, so the gap widens every year even when nobody resigns.

The structure has not kept up either. There are only three levels between the managing director and the cab: one operations director, six supervisors, and the drivers. Each supervisor therefore looks after a large team spread across a region, most of whom they see for a few minutes a day at a weighbridge. Two supervisors have asked for help and one has gone off sick.

Olu Adeyemi, the operations director, has told the board that Northvale must decide whether to train its own drivers or outbid everyone else for the ones who are already qualified. Either way, she has said, the company cannot go on running a fleet it has nobody to drive.

Source: Northvale Logistics Ltd

Appendix A: Northvale Logistics Ltd selected data, year to March 2025

Source: Northvale Logistics Ltd

Appendix B: How Northvale's 132 drivers are spread across the six supervisors

Source: Northvale Logistics Ltd

Appendix D: Two ways of filling the 23 driver vacancies

Source: Analyst

Northvale Logistics Ltd is considering two ways of filling its 23 driver vacancies:

Option 1: train its own drivers through an apprenticeship

Option 2: pay above the market rate to recruit qualified drivers

Evaluate both options and recommend which one Northvale Logistics Ltd should choose.

Calculate the cost for each qualified driver produced under Option 1 in the first year to support your answer.