Studying our Social Policy and Social Research BSc (Hons) course will equip you with in-depth knowledge and skills around policy, research and social issues. From the first year of your study, you will receive crucial support in preparing for your career in social sciences in our Career Planning for Social Scientists unit. This will be an opportunity for you to discover your motivations, consider possible graduate destinations, understand employer expectations and explore employment options. To provide a foundation to your study, you will be introduced to the history, function and future of key areas of social policy and its provision in the United Kingdom within our Critical Debates in Policy and Society unit. You will draw upon this knowledge going into our unit in Modern Britain where you will recognise the fluid relationships between the social, political and economic aspects of post-World War II history in the UK including a focus on Brexit and its effects in contemporary British society. Similarly, The Policymaking Process will introduce you to the various structures, systems and processes of public policy with a focus on five key issues in social policy including education, health and social care, housing, criminal justice and social security.

In your second year, you will move on to examine more complex social issues. Our unit in Poverty and Inequality: Identity, Difference and Outcomes will allow you to interrogate the intricate relationships between poverty, inequality, identity and their diverse outcomes based on key sociological theories. At the same time, you will be given the opportunity to engage in Work-Based Experience in Social Policy where you will apply theory to practice in a 300-hour work-focused experience. To support you with your research work as part of the course, Managing and Evaluating Research Projects will equip you with the skills for effective research project design and execution in the field of applied social research. Building on these research tools, our unit in Data and Research for Policymaking will allow you to develop the confidence to work with data in the field of research in social policy which you will be able to apply to academic work such as in your research dissertation, or in future employment contexts. You will build on these skills further in your final year by learning to apply data management and analysis skills to real-world social policy issues based on an introduction to data analytics, handling, security and ethics in our Data Analytics for Social Policy unit. To further equip you with the research skills in the field of social sciences, you will explore debates and theories in social research, identify quantitative and qualitative data research methods, and learn to interpret and analyse this data across different levels of your study with our units in an Introduction to Research and Social Enquiry, Research Methods 1: Collecting Data and Research Methods 2: Exploring Data.

In your final year of study, you will draw on your existing understanding of the policymaking process to inform your study of Governance and Stakeholders. With a critical approach, you will interrogate the stakeholders in positions of power in governance and the increasingly networked nature of policy making to question the implications of this for social justice. Drawing on your knowledge from previous units, in Critical Debates in Policy and Society and Poverty and Inequality, you will consider social policy through the lens of ‘wicked’ problems to question how policymakers define, manage and attempt to resolve some of the most complex problems in social policy within our Wicked Problems in the Internet Age unit. You will also be introduced to international human rights and international sustainable development goals in our Human Rights and Social Policy unit to understand its impact on social policy development, implementation and advocacy.

Finally, you will have the choice of completing a SASS Change Maker Project Dissertation or a Research Dissertation to develop and demonstrate your academic and professional skills. In the project-based dissertation, you will have the opportunity to work with a community-based organisation to deliver a project while building on skills that will support your personal development towards your desired graduate career. If you choose to undertake a research dissertation, you will work on developing a research proposal and move on to conduct an in-depth, focused research enquiry around an area of professional interest while considering the ethical implications of your work.