Social Work with Foundation Year

Foundation Year
Our Foundation Year provides an excellent alternative route to Keele, providing a unique opportunity to better prepare for your chosen degree, and with guaranteed entry onto your undergraduate course once you successfully complete your Foundation Year. This extra year of study can improve your academic skills, expand your subject knowledge, give you a better understanding of higher education and, perhaps most importantly of all, build your confidence. On the Keele Foundation Year, you'll study on campus, joining our undergraduate community from the outset, with access to all the facilities and support that you'd get as an undergraduate student at Keele.

Social Work
Begin your journey to become a social worker making positive changes in people’s lives on Keele's Social Work BA. Support diverse groups of people of all ages, and promote human rights and social justice in a flexible, varied and challenging career in which you will learn to be autonomous so you can progress in your chosen field.

Why choose this course?

• Social Work ranked Top 10 in England (NSS 2025, broad-based universities)*

• Social work England approved and all staff are registered social workers.

• Excellent partnerships with placement providers, employers and service users and carers involved in work with students throughout the course

• State-of-the-art facilities including excellent simulation facilities as part of the excellent School of Medicine facilities

• No.1 in the West Midlands for Social Work (Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide, 2026)

Social work focuses on improving the lives and wellbeing of adults, children and families, and helping to protect the most vulnerable in society. You may have to make difficult decisions, sometimes when there are competing 'rights' and needs. You will work with a diverse range of individuals and groups to assist them through difficult circumstances. It could be helping them to address issues currently affecting their lives such as trauma, poverty or social disadvantage, organising specific support or making referrals to other services.

Study social work at Keele to gain a solid grounding in this professional area of study and be supported in the development of key professional skills and values ready for your future career as a Social Worker. Our social work degree has been carefully designed to allow you to apply the course theory into a range of exciting, varied and specialist social work occupations in the UK and potentially internationally.

About Keele
Keele University was established in 1949 by the former Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University. Founded to meet the needs of a changing world, Keele has always had a pioneering vision to be a different kind of university.

We excel in both teaching and research, with some of the most satisfied students in England, and research that is changing lives for the better at a regional, national and global level.

Our beautiful 600-acre campus is one of the biggest in Britain – but all the most important services and facilities are on your doorstep, with accommodation, teaching spaces, facilities including a medical centre, sports centre and pharmacy, and a range of shops, eateries and entertainment venues – including the Students’ Union – clustered around the centre.

Course Modules

For a list of indicative modules please visit the course page on the Keele University website.