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This paper explores the potential that block teaching offers to enhance employability in the context of large-scale classes. It suggests that block teaching, with its condensed structure, necessitates curriculum innovation, fosters participatory learning and peer-to-peer networking, and has been shown to increase student focus and enhance engagement and attainment, especially amongst diverse learners. As these are the same challenges that large-scale teaching faces, it is proposed that intensive modes of delivery could be scaled up in a way that may help to mitigate such problems as cohorts in business schools continue to increase in size.

The paper is based on secondary research and provides an overview of literature that looks at block teaching, followed by that which explores the challenges of large-scale teaching contexts. It compares and contrasts the gaps in both to suggest a way that they could be combined.

The paper provides key insights into changes in the contemporary landscape of teaching within UK business schools, which have seen increasingly large cohorts and draws out the key strengths of intensive modes of delivery, which include helping students to time manage effectively, encouraging curriculum innovation and the creation of participatory learning opportunities as well as providing closer personal relationships between students and staff. Outlining some of the well-documented issues that can arise when teaching larger cohorts, the paper suggests that scaling up blocked delivery may offer a new way help to overcome them.

Because of the chosen research approach, the research results are subject to generalisation. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to test the proposed propositions in large-scale teaching scenarios.

This paper includes implications for the development of innovative modes of teaching in the context of large cohorts, an experience that is increasingly common amongst British business schools and beyond.

This paper brings together two bodies of literature for the first time – that of intensive modes of teaching and that focuses on large-scale teaching contexts – for the first time to show how the former may help to overcome some of the key issues arising in the latter.