Education (including foundation year)

Why study this course?

Our Education (including foundation year) BA degree will open opportunities for you to enter education. Our four-year course is the perfect route into a career in education if you can’t meet the necessary entry requirements or don't have the traditional qualifications required to start a standard undergraduate degree. You’ll graduate with the same degree title and award as students on the traditional route.

On the course you’ll have tutors and academic mentors who will support you to achieve your educational goals and identify your strengths. Offering great flexibility by the end of your foundation year, we’ll provide you with opportunities for specialism in a wide-range of subjects after introducing you to a broad range of social sciences and current subjects.

More about this course

Our Education (including a foundation year) BA course will engage your interest in a range of issues within the sphere of education and social sciences. Learning in a stimulating environment, you’ll develop your critical thinking and reasoning skills, allowing you to construct, evaluate and defend arguments in the sphere of education and related studies. We’ll equip you with the practical and academic skills that will allow you to assess what shapes educational practices, policies and institutions.

Throughout your degree, you’ll receive academic and pastoral support from a range of services at the University. Your support system will include an academic tutor and academic mentors, who will offer individual support, as well as small group workshops to reinforce your skills development and to ensure that you’re settling into university.

The foundation year will build your confidence and improve your academic skills, providing a great foundation for higher academic study. You’ll develop an important variety of skills including research, report writing, critical analysis and planning. All of these are considered necessary by employers across an array of industries and indispensable in higher study of education and other social sciences.

Your foundation will be shared with students from a number of our other foundation year courses, so in Year 0 you'll get to study with other students interested in a variety of different specialisms. You’ll also take a taster module in education, so that you can gain an awareness of the field you will be studying for the following years. The taster module will introduce you to perspectives on the nature and purpose of education. It will present a critical overview of key historical changes that have shaped formal systems of education and highlight wider discussion on politics and policy in education, in particular issues around diversity and inclusion.

The focus in the subsequent years will shift from providing you with academic skills in the context of education studies to expanding your knowledge of the theories and practices in the field of education.