Program Overview

Our four-year BA Childhood Studies (including foundation year), will be suitable for you if your academic qualifications do not yet meet our entrance requirements for the three-year version of this course and you want a programme that increases your subject knowledge as well as improves your academic skills in order to support your academic performance.

This four-year course includes a foundation year (Year Zero), followed by a further three years of study. During your Year Zero, you study three academic subjects relevant to your chosen course as well as a compulsory academic skills module.

After successful completion of Year Zero in our Essex Pathways Department, you progress to complete your course with our Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies.

From year one you will continue developing your academic skills alongside discovering what drives children’s development, what informs their behaviour and what shapes their identity. Children today face a wide range of new and challenging experiences, including unprecedented access to media, wider cultural diversity, online bullying and larger school numbers. Their early experiences of childhood affect them for the rest of their lives. You can make a positive contribution to these formative years.

Childhood studies is a vibrant and exciting field which has expanded in recent years to include knowledge from psychology, sociology and psychoanalysis. This course lays the foundations for a career working with infants and children, whether in education, health care or children’s services. You gain a solid understanding of child development, the ecology of childhood (the place of children in different societies) and many other exciting topics including:

• Psychosocial approaches
• Child development and attachment theory
• Understanding ADHD, developmental trauma and Autism
• Criminological approaches
• Play and infant observation
• Children in literature
• Therapeutic work in groups
• Wellbeing and resilience
• Psychodynamics of teaching, learning and group work

Our Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies is internationally recognised as one of the leading departments for work on the role of the unconscious mind in mental health, as well as in culture and society more generally. We’re ranked top 10 in the UK for research (REF, 2014) and consistently receive high student satisfaction scores.