BA (Hons) Education Studies

What can this course lead to?

Designed in close partnership with industry experts, this degree targets local workforce skills gaps to position you as a highly competitive “change agent” in the education sector. Your career trajectory could include:

• Initial Teacher Training (ITE): Progress directly onto a PGCE or School Direct pathway to gain Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) for primary or secondary classrooms.
• Specialist Classroom & Support Roles: Step into high-impact, in-demand roles responding to regional shortages, such as a specialist SEND practitioner, neurodiversity advocate, or inclusion coordinator.
• Family and Community Support: Forge a rewarding path in multi-agency safeguarding teams, pastoral care, trauma-informed care frameworks, or community educational leadership.
• Setting Management: Advance into senior positions, such as nursery managers, early years coordinators, or school cluster leaders.
• Wider Human Services: Adapt your skills to thriving careers within educational charities, local government policy, social work, or healthcare support sectors.
• Postgraduate Study: Progress confidently onto Master’s degrees, advanced research fellowships, or educational policy programmes, backed by the intellectual independence of your final-year major project.

Who is it for?

Transform your passion for learning into a high-impact professional career with our comprehensive BA (Hons) Education Studies degree. Validated and awarded by Lincoln Bishop University (previously known as Bishop Grosseteste University) and delivered at University Centre Peterborough, this programme offers a modern, streamlined curriculum that meets the exact demands of today’s educational employers.

This new course bridges foundational theory with transformative practice, offering a distinct global and contemporary focus. While traditional pathways force you into rigid, separate tracks, this broad-based degree explores high-priority areas across the full 0–19 age range. This gives you the unique flexibility to align each academic assignment with your specific career interests—whether your passion lies in early years settings, nurseries, primary schools, or secondary education.

We believe that the best way to learn about education is to be an active part of it. Across all three years, you will combine academic seminar study with work-based placement commitments, transforming your current workplace or volunteer setting into a practical learning laboratory. You will cultivate critical modern competencies, including trauma-informed safeguarding, Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) expertise, and ethical digital fluency with AI tools, allowing you to graduate as an empowered advocate for the next generation of learners.

What is covered?

The curriculum follows a progressive "spiral" model across three levels, steadily shifting you from a supported learner to an independent professional ready to lead curriculum interventions. You must take modules worth 120 credits at each level of the course. Each module is worth a specified number of credits.

Level 4: Mastering the Foundations

• Child Development (30 Credits): Links major psychological and developmental frameworks directly to contemporary classroom hurdles.
• Curriculum and Context (30 Credits): Explores the historic and political evolution of statutory frameworks (like the National Curriculum and EYFS) within the English landscape.
• Global Perspectives (30 Credits): Investigates diverse philosophical, sociological, and pedagogical models shaping international education and care.
• Reflective and Professional Practice (30 Credits): Integrates vital academic writing, digital research tools, and reflective journals with your active workplace setting.

Level 5: Deepening Professional Critique

• Safeguarding & Wellbeing (30 Credits): Focuses heavily on trauma-informed practice, multi-agency dynamics, and establishing holistic group wellbeing frameworks.
• Supporting Individual Needs (30 Credits): Masters proactive, evidence-based inclusion strategies to support neurodiverse learners and dismantle learning barriers.
• Leadership & Management (30 Credits): Builds strategic communication, teamwork resilience, and professional management styles for future educational leaders.
• Childhood in a Social Context (30 Credits): Critically examines how economic and socio-political macro-systems impact modern families, children, and practitioners.

Level 6: Systemic Evaluation and Innovation

• Undergraduate Major Project (30 Credits): A year-long, independent piece of research where you design, clear through our ethics board, and execute a project that adds immediate value to your setting.
• Creativity in Educational Practice (30 Credits): Challenges standard learning assumptions, explores innovative pedagogy, and designs highly creative delivery spaces.
• Contemporary Issues (30 Credits): Interrogates immediate, fast-moving themes like the classroom digital landscape, decolonisation, and environmental sustainability.
• Social Justice: Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (30 Credits): Critically challenges standard structural biases, advocating for systemic inclusivity, equality, and anti-discriminatory practice.