Studying our Education Studies and English BA (Hons) with Foundation Year course will provide you with a firm knowledge of key educational theories and ideas, language and English Literature. If you are passionate about working with children, young people and families, our unit in the Narratives of Childhood will allow you to consider children’s educational experiences, including through the effect of the digital age. The course also offers a range of optional units in education including The Lifelong Curriculum unit that will not only teach you to design curriculum, but how to implement it based on educational policy. You will keep this knowledge in mind during our Developing Teaching Practice unit, where you will learn to deliver effective classroom sessions based on research in the field. This ties closely into our Comparative Education unit, where you will adopt a diverse approach to analysing the issues and problems affecting international education. As an English student, you will also be introduced to a range of literary genres including poetry, drama and fiction in our Approaching Literature unit while exploring a range of theoretical approaches to these texts. Similarly, you will learn How Talk Works and How Text Works by focusing on the rules of conversation, its patterns and norms, and how it varies between people and situations. You will do the same with the written word by exploring the different ways texts are produced, its purposes and meanings to help build your language interpretation skills.

Another relevant area of English study includes our Shakespeare and His Contemporaries unit where you will consider genres including comedies and tragedies from playwrights such as Shakespeare and Marlowe to gain an in-depth knowledge of the philosophical, cultural and political conditions that inform English Renaissance drama. On the opposite end, you will examine literature and theory based in popular culture from the late nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century in our Modernist Literary Practices unit. In more specific areas of literature, the course offers a range of optional units from studying the works of Chaucer to the phenomenon of the Twilight trilogy. These optional literary units include Telling Tales: Early Modern Literature, Restoration Literature, Eighteenth-Century Literature, Romantic Literature, Victorian Literature, Gothic Literature, Postmodern British and American Literature, Modern Irish Literature and World Literature: Crossing Borders. Another key skill as an educational professional is writing, and this is where our Creative Writing unit will introduce you to writing short stories and poetry that you will share in small group workshops.

To aid with this, our Children’s and Young Adult Fiction unit will familiarise you with a range of fictional genres written for children, including film adaptations, fairy tales, and other popular fiction; analyse accepted norms in education and pedagogy in our Deschooling unit; or consider the economic and cultural factors shaping family experience in our Families and Communities unit. Aside from this, you will be able to debate and investigate the role of the media and political institutions in education in our Contemporary Debates in Education, Childhood and Youth unit while also analysing social policy and inclusion in the context of UK contemporary welfare reform in our unit in The Inclusive Society. There is also an opportunity for philosophical study where you will be able to learn about a range of philosophical concepts and methods in education in our Introduction to Educational Philosophy unit while also exploring the relationship between the two in our Reading Philosophy and Education unit. In areas of the mind, you will also discuss developmental psychology in our Early Childhood Psychology unit while examining how this impacts learning and how to utilise this within educational settings.

With more young people experiencing mental health issues, our unit in Children and Young People’s Wellbeing will teach you to support children through understanding social and emotional issues in education. Similarly, you will focus on how behaviour is understood within educational contexts in our Perspectives on Pedagogy and Behaviour unit. In the same field, our unit in Representations of Disability will allow you to criticise disability representation in the media and how this influences its perceptions. Finally, you will complete a Dissertation in Education Studies where you will have the option to complete either a research dissertation or a creative writing project. Similarly, you will further develop your research skills in our Research in Action unit where you will work with your lecturer based on a chosen topic from a given list of research ideas. In addition, you will also have the opportunity to undertake a Professional Practice Year (Education and English Language) to gain work-based learning experiences and develop your employability skills.

To develop your foundation skills, you will also be introduced to aspects of sociology in our Individuals in Society (Education) and our Contemporary Society in a Global World (Education) units. You will relate your values and beliefs to sociological theory and apply this to education. Furthermore, our unit in Examining Research will allow you to think about how education and sport is developed through research, while our Studying for Higher Education unit will introduce you to academic study skills useful for higher education settings. Additionally, to develop your employability prospects, our unit in The Professional Workplace will teach you to build professional work relationships and perform the role of a graduate professional.