Psychological Studies (Child Development and Education)

Whether you already work with children and young people or would like to work with them, our BA Psychological Studies (Child Development and Education) will prepare you for a wide range of jobs and help enhance your career progression. It offers you the opportunity to gain skills and understanding in how psychological theory and research can be applied to supporting children’s and young people’s learning and development more effectively.

Why choose this course?

• This course is ideal if you want to work with children and young people. You will learn about their development, mental health, emotional wellbeing, and how psychology can be applied to support wellbeing and learning.

• It will allow you to explore how psychological theories and research can be applied to professional contexts.

• It will also help you develop professional skills, as well as strategies and approaches that will be directly applicable in your work.

What you will learn

Drawing on our expertise in psychological sciences, this course focuses on a range of relevant issues, including:

• intellectual, social and emotional development

• children’s mental health and wellbeing

• learning and learning difficulties

• communication and relationship building

• special educational needs, inclusion and diversity

• reflective practice.

You will study key issues in developmental and educational psychology, critically analyse theories and research, and explore how these can support your professional practice. Throughout the degree you will be able to select option modules to reflect your interests. In your final year you will produce an extended essay on a topic of your choice.

How you will learn

This course is available to study part-time in the evenings with some Saturday attendance in the first year. Our approach is highly student-centred with a focus on building your skills including through additional study days and workshops. You will also have the opportunity to reflect on your own career and professional practice, as well as obtaining valuable experience through a short placement.

Highlights

• Birkbeck is strongly oriented towards research in psychological sciences and we are home to the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, , the Birkbeck-UCL Centre for Neuroimaging and the Centre for Cognition, Computation and Modelling. We also recently became members of the Bloomsbury Centre for Genetic Epidemiology and Statistics.

• In the 2023 National Student Survey, Birkbeck's School of Psychological Sciences ranked 5th in the UK for teaching. We are consistently regarded as one of the top institutions teaching psychological sciences in the UK. In the 2021 Research Excellence Framework, and for the third time, we were ranked in the top ten universities in the UK.

Careers and employability

On graduating successfully from this BA, you will have gained an array of transferable skills, including:

• the ability to critically analyse and evaluate material

• oral and written communication skills

• independent and critical thinking

• numeracy, problem analysis and problem-solving skills

• knowledge and understanding of key areas of psychology

• reflective and evidence-based practice.

Our graduates have progressed to a wide range of careers, including:

• specialist support workers and special educational needs co-ordinators

• learning mentors and family support professionals

• nursery professionals and managers

• school pastoral and wellbeing roles.

Others have continued their studies to master’s level or gained professional qualifications, for example, as teachers, speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, counsellors and psychotherapists specialising in therapeutic work with children and young people.

Some of our graduates from this course have gone on to be employed in schools and nurseries, local authorities, mental health services and the National Health Service.

For information about course structure and the moules you will be studying, please visit Birkbeck’s online prospectus.

Essays, including essay plans and an extended essay; case studies; research reports; critical analyses of published papers; class presentations; learning and reflective journals; and examinations.

You can find more specific details of assessments on the individual module pages.