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History (Professional Placement Year)

Entry requirements


A level

B,B,B-B,C,C

A Level - grades BBB-BCC usually including a Grade B in History or a related subject.

Access to HE Diploma

M:45

Typical offers for applicants with Access to HE will be the Access to HE Diploma or Access to HE Certificate (60 credits, 45 of which must be Level 3, at Merit or higher).

International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme

32

A minimum of 32 points are required.

Pearson BTEC Level 3 National Extended Diploma (first teaching from September 2016)

DDM-DMM

Extended Diploma grades from Distinction Distinction Merit (DDM) to Distinction Merit Merit (DMM) in a related subject.

T Level

M

Grade Merit is preferred in a relevant subject.

UCAS Tariff

104-120

We've calculated how many Ucas points you'll need for this course.

About this course


Course option

4years

Full-time | 2024

Subject

History

**Fascinated by the past? Want to make a difference in the present? Develop practical and professional skills with our applied History degree.**

- Develop practical and professional skills and apply them to contemporary challenges, issues and debates.

- Use your understanding of evidence and your ability to analyse information to solve problems and challenge convention.

- Explore the next stage in your career - our graduates have gone on to work with leading employers in a wide range of different roles.

Apply your knowledge of History to contemporary challenges, issues and debates. Our innovative History degree has been designed to enable you to acquire specialised subject knowledge alongisde practical and professional skills.

Our History course is inspiring, innovative and compelling. Our Newton Park campus is beautiful, but it’s also a historic resource in its own right and a way into a wide range of historical subjects and approaches – from reading a landscape to analysing the symbols of wealth and power and tracing their international connections.

The nearby cities of Bath and Bristol offer an extraordinary wealth of material for historical study. Bristol, after all, is where the statue of Edward Colston was toppled into the river, and made us all reflect on the ways history continues to shape the present; we need to understand where we’ve been to have a sense of where we might go next.

**Develop practical and professional skills**

Working collaboratively with a wide range of disciplines, we offer a unique approach to learning in and outside your subject.

You’ll become a confident communicator, able to sift through the raw materials of history and re-present your findings to any audience – on any platform. Yes, you’ll write essays. But you’ll also learn to podcast, tweet, blog, create scripts for film and radio, and adapt your style to suit a range of consumers, including young audiences. We also want you to be able to plan and initiate projects, work with your peers and with our external partners, and make a contribution to our wider community.

Our programmes are taught by people whose research embraces past and present, abstract concepts and physical structures. It crosses continents. You'll analyse big data and tiny fragments of text, and explore objects and images, the rhetoric of power, the gaps in the narrative.

**What can you do with a History degree?**

Our research has impact internationally, nationally and locally. Our teaching draws on this and on our work as policy advisors, trustees, fundraisers, advocates, curators, conservators, broadcasters, game designers, web editors, poets. Our graduates go on to do all of these things – and more.

**More about the Professional Placement Year**
A Professional Placement Year (PPY), traditionally known as a sandwich year, is where a student undertakes a period of work with an external organisation for between 9-13 months. The placement occurs between the students' second and third years of undergraduate study. Students can engage in up to 3 placements to make up the total time and are required to source the placement(s) themselves with support from the Careers & Employability Team.

Modules

Year 1 - Introductions and foundations: develop your historical skills and follow a broad curriculum which allows you to ask questions, challenge your own assumptions, interrogate evidence, data and opinions.

In Year 2 - Practical, applied, relevant: this year combines the academic study of your chosen topics with the acquisition of professional skills and the application of your knowledge and understanding to a defined problem or idea.

Year 3 - Professional Placement Year.

Year 4 - Achievement, consolidation, creativity: your final project in the third year brings all this together. You’ll identify your own historical questions, develop your proposal and put it into practice. This might be an extended piece of academic writing, but it might also be an exhibition, community project, or the creation of digital resources.

Assessment methods

We’ll assess your progress in a variety of ways including essays, research papers, group presentations, projects, portfolios, and reports. There are timed assessments and some modules may have end-of-year examinations.

Our assessment methods allow you to develop and demonstrate different skills. Many of these will help you in the workplace, for example: planning ahead, working to deadlines, and managing priorities.

Remember that you’ll be devising your own projects and research questions, giving you the freedom to develop your own expertise, supported by your tutors, our partners and your peers.

Tuition fees

Select where you currently live to see what you'll pay:

Channel Islands
£9,250
per year
England
£9,250
per year
EU
£15,750
for the whole course
International
£15,750
for the whole course
Northern Ireland
£9,250
per year
Republic of Ireland
£9,250
per year
Scotland
£9,250
per year
Wales
£9,250
per year

The Uni


Course location:

Bath Spa University

Department:

School of Writing, Publishing and the Humanities

Read full university profile

What students say


We've crunched the numbers to see if overall student satisfaction here is high, medium or low compared to students studying this subject(s) at other universities.

80%
History

How do students rate their degree experience?

The stats below relate to the general subject area/s at this university, not this specific course. We show this where there isn’t enough data about the course, or where this is the most detailed info available to us.

History

Teaching and learning

80%
Staff make the subject interesting
84%
Staff are good at explaining things
80%
Ideas and concepts are explored in-depth
75%
Opportunities to apply what I've learned

Assessment and feedback

Feedback on work has been timely
Feedback on work has been helpful
Staff are contactable when needed
Good advice available when making study choices

Resources and organisation

47%
Library resources
73%
IT resources
80%
Course specific equipment and facilities
68%
Course is well organised and has run smoothly

Student voice

Staff value students' opinions
Feel part of a community on my course

Who studies this subject and how do they get on?

99%
UK students
1%
International students
48%
Male students
52%
Female students
90%
2:1 or above
8%
First year drop out rate

Most popular A-Levels studied (and grade achieved)

C
C
D

After graduation


The stats in this section relate to the general subject area/s at this university – not this specific course. We show this where there isn't enough data about the course, or where this is the most detailed info available to us.

History

What are graduates doing after six months?

This is what graduates told us they were doing (and earning), shortly after completing their course. We've crunched the numbers to show you if these immediate prospects are high, medium or low, compared to those studying this subject/s at other universities.

£18,000
med
Average annual salary
96%
med
Employed or in further education
41%
med
Employed in a role where degree was essential or beneficial

Top job areas of graduates

18%
Sales assistants and retail cashiers
16%
Sales, marketing and related associate professionals
9%
Business, finance and related associate professionals

History is a very popular subject (although numbers have fallen of late) — in 2015, over 10,000 UK students graduated in a history-related course. Obviously, there aren't 11,000 jobs as historians available every year, but history is a good, flexible degree that allows graduates to go into a wide range of different jobs, and consequently history graduates have an unemployment rate comparable to the national graduate average. Many — probably most — jobs for graduates don't ask for a particular degree to go into them and history graduates are well set to take advantage. That's why so many go into jobs in the finance industry, human resources, marketing, PR and events management, as well as the more obvious roles in education, welfare and the arts. Around one in five history graduates went into further study last year. History and teaching were the most popular further study subjects for history graduates, but law, journalism, and politics were also popular postgraduate courses.

What about your long term prospects?

Looking further ahead, below is a rough guide for what graduates went on to earn.

History

The graph shows median earnings of graduates who achieved a degree in this subject area one, three and five years after graduating from here.

£17k

£17k

£23k

£23k

£24k

£24k

Note: this data only looks at employees (and not those who are self-employed or also studying) and covers a broad sample of graduates and the various paths they've taken, which might not always be a direct result of their degree.

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Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF):

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This information comes from the National Student Survey, an annual student survey of final-year students. You can use this to see how satisfied students studying this subject area at this university, are (not the individual course).

This is the percentage of final-year students at this university who were "definitely" or "mostly" satisfied with their course. We've analysed this figure against other universities so you can see whether this is high, medium or low.

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This information is from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), for undergraduate students only.

You can use this to get an idea of who you might share a lecture with and how they progressed in this subject, here. It's also worth comparing typical A-level subjects and grades students achieved with the current course entry requirements; similarities or differences here could indicate how flexible (or not) a university might be.

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Post-six month graduation stats:

This is from the Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education Survey, based on responses from graduates who studied the same subject area here.

It offers a snapshot of what grads went on to do six months later, what they were earning on average, and whether they felt their degree helped them obtain a 'graduate role'. We calculate a mean rating to indicate if this is high, medium or low compared to other universities.

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Graduate field commentary:

The Higher Education Careers Services Unit have provided some further context for all graduates in this subject area, including details that numbers alone might not show

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The Longitudinal Educational Outcomes dataset combines HRMC earnings data with student records from the Higher Education Statistics Agency.

While there are lots of factors at play when it comes to your future earnings, use this as a rough timeline of what graduates in this subject area were earning on average one, three and five years later. Can you see a steady increase in salary, or did grads need some experience under their belt before seeing a nice bump up in their pay packet?

Have a question about this info? Learn more here