Childhood and Youth Studies with Criminology
Entry requirements
A level
104-112 points to include a minimum of 2 A levels.
106-112 Tariff points from the Access to HE Diploma.
Cambridge Pre-U score of 44-46.
GCSE/National 4/National 5
3 GCSEs at grade C or above to include English and Mathematics/3 GCSEs at grade 4 or above to include English and Mathematics.
International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme
25 points from the IB Diploma, to include 3 Higher Level subjects.
Leaving Certificate - Higher Level (Ireland) (first awarded in 2017)
H3,H3,H3,H4,H4-H3,H3,H3,H3,H4
Acceptable when combined with other qualifications.
Acceptable when combined with other qualifications.
Pearson BTEC Level 3 National Extended Diploma (first teaching from September 2016)
104-112 Tariff points to include a minimum of 2 Advanced Highers.
Acceptable when combined with other qualifications.
T Level
UCAS Tariff
104-112 points to include a minimum of 2 A levels, or equivalent.
104-112 points from the Advanced Welsh Baccalaureate including 1 A level, plus the Advanced Skills Challenge Certificate.
About this course
This course has alternative study modes. Contact the university to find out how the information below might vary.
**This is a Connected Degree**
Portsmouth is the only University in the UK with the flexibility to choose when to do an optional paid placement or self-employed year. Either take a placement in your third year, or finish your studies first and complete a placement in your fourth year. You can decide if and when to take a placement after you've started your course.
**Overview**
Our experiences in childhood and adolescence can have a huge influence on the choices we make and how society sees us.
On this Childhood and Youth Studies with Criminology degree, you'll explore the issues affecting children and young people aged 8–18, and the role of the criminal justice system and the causes of crime – as well as how these subject areas interconnect.
Learning from academic researchers and staff with experience as practitioners in the field, you'll focus on young people’s development, learning and relationships, and delve into the complex policies, practices and societal pressures that impact them.
You'll also have the chance to focus your childhood and youth studies on a particular specialism - education and teaching, community and youth/family provision, or leadership and enterprise.
After the course, you'll graduate with the skills and knowledge for a rewarding career working with children and young people in a variety of settings, including youth intervention, youth justice and social work.
- Spend two-thirds of your time at the School of Education and Sociology, examining topics around child development, education, psychology, health and social work
- Spend your remaining time studying at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, learning about crime, punishment and rehabilitation
- Practise real-world scenarios in our Family Assessment Room, where you'll examine how parents and children feel during family meetings, and explore your responsibilities as a practitioner
- Tailor your studies to your career goals and interests, and have the option to complete pre-entry qualifications for a career in probation work or community justice
- Enrich your learning and build relationships with potential employers by volunteering, studying abroad or doing a work placement alongside your studies
- Develop a set of key transferable life and career skills, including critical thinking, team working, empathy and problem solving
**Careers and opportunities**
This Childhood and Youth Studies with Criminology degree will prepare you for a range of careers working on behalf of children and young people.
There's significant demand for graduates who have the expert skills and knowledge to work with young people and children in the community in this way, particularly since the pandemic and its impact on education.
**What can you do with a childhood and youth studies with criminology degree?**
After the course, you could work in areas such as:
- youth work
- law enforcement and the police
- social work
- social justice
- children's rights
- social policy
- probation
- educational welfare
- health promotion
- teaching
**Placement year and work experience**
After your second year, you can do a paid placement year in a youth work setting. You'll have the opportunity to make a positive difference to young people while applying your knowledge and boosting your employability.
Previous students have put their skills to work at organisations such as:
- Portsmouth in the Community (PitC)
- KidsOut
- Victim Support
We’ll help you secure a placement that fits your ambitions. You’ll get mentoring and support to get the most out of your placement year.
This course also allows you to take the Learning From Experience (LiFE) option. This means you can earn credits towards your degree for work, volunteer and research placements that you do alongside your study.
We can also help you identify additional work experience, internship and voluntary opportunities that complement your studies.
Modules
Year 1
Core modules in this year include:
- Becoming a Researcher – 20 credits
- Child and Youth Development – 20 credits
- Criminal Justice – 20 credits
- Understanding Childhoods – 40 credits
- Understanding Criminology – 20 credits
There are no optional modules in this year.
Year 2
Core modules in this year include:
- Penology and Prison – 20 credits
- Professional Practice With Children and Young People – 20 credits
- Questioning Criminology – 20 credits
- Research With Children and Young People – 20 credits
- Youth Culture – 20 credits
Optional modules in this year include:
- Children's Social Minds – 20 credits
- Development of Learning – 20 credits
- Empire and Its Afterlives in Britain, Europe, and Africa – 20 credits
- Global Childhoods – 20 credits
- Global Security - 20 credits
- Intercultural Perspectives On Communication – 20 credits
- Marketing and Communication - 20 credits
- Modernity and Globalisation - 20 credits
- Nationalism and Migration: Chaos, Crisis and the Everyday - 20 credits
- News, Discourse and Media - 20 credits
- Principles of Economic Crime Investigation - 20 credits
- Professional Experience L5 - 20 credits
- Space, Place and Being - 20 credits
- Transitional Justice and Human Rights - 20 credits
- Wildlife Crime: Threats and Response - 20 credits
Placement year (optional)
On this course, you can do an optional work placement year between your 2nd and 3rd years to get valuable experience working in industry. We’ll help you secure a work placement that fits your situation and ambitions. You’ll get mentoring and support throughout the year.
Year 3
Core modules in this year include:
- Dissertation / Major Project (Childhood Studies) – 40 credits
- Issues Relating to Children and Young People's Mental Health – 20 credits
- Young People's Relationships and Aspirations – 20 credits
Optional modules in this year include:
- Black Criminology, Race and the Criminal Justice System – 20 credits
- Cyberpsychology - 20 credits
- Dangerous Offenders and Public Protection – 20 credits
- Gender and Crime – 20 credits
- Green Crime and Environmental Justice – 20 credits
- Policing: Communities, Intelligence and Information – 20 credits
- Policing: Law, Policy and Practice – 20 credits
- Professional Experience L6 - 20 credits
- Treatment and Rehabilitation of Offenders – 20 credits
- True Crime - The Making of a Genre – 20 credits
We use the best and most current research and professional practice alongside feedback from our students to make sure course content is relevant to your future career or further studies.
Therefore, some course content may change over time to reflect changes in the discipline or industry and some optional modules may not run every year. If a module doesn’t run, we’ll let you know as soon as possible and help you choose an alternative module.
Assessment methods
How you're assessed
You’ll be assessed through:
- essays
- group and individual presentations and projects
- creative assessments, such as storyboards or video
- practical assessments, such as lesson plans and delivery
- exams
- a dissertation
You’ll be able to test your skills and knowledge informally before you do assessments that count towards your final mark.
You can get feedback on all practice and formal assessments so you can improve in the future.
Tuition fees
Select where you currently live to see what you'll pay:
The Uni
University of Portsmouth
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
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.
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.
Childhood and youth studies
Teaching and learning
Assessment and feedback
Resources and organisation
Student voice
Who studies this subject and how do they get on?
Most popular A-Levels studied (and grade achieved)
Sociology
Teaching and learning
Assessment and feedback
Resources and organisation
Student voice
Who studies this subject and how do they get on?
Most popular A-Levels studied (and grade achieved)
Social work
Teaching and learning
Assessment and feedback
Resources and organisation
Student voice
Who studies this subject and how do they get on?
Most popular A-Levels studied (and grade achieved)
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.
Childhood and youth studies
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.
Top job areas of graduates
Sociology
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.
Top job areas of graduates
We have quite a lot of sociology graduates, although numbers fell last year. But graduates still do pretty well. Most sociology graduates go straight into work when they complete their degrees, and a lot of graduates go into jobs in social professions such as recruitment, education, community and youth work, and housing. An important option for a sociology graduate is social work - and we're short of people willing to take this challenging but rewarding career. Sociology is a flexible degree and you can find graduates from the subject in pretty much every reasonable job — obviously, you don't find many doctors or engineers, but you do find them in finance, the media, healthcare, marketing and even IT. Sociology graduates taking further study often branch out into other qualifications, like teaching, law, psychology, HR and even maths, so don’t think a sociology degree restricts you to just one set of options.
Social work
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.
Top job areas of graduates
We're short of social workers - so if you want a degree that is in demand, then this could be the one for you! There's a shortage of social workers all over the UK, and graduates can specialise in specific fields such as mental health or children's social work. If you decide social work is not for you, then social work graduates also often go into management, education, youth and community work and even nursing. Starting salaries for this degree can reflect the high proportion of graduates who choose a social work career - social work graduates get paid, on average, more than graduates overall, but not all options pay as well as social work. This is also an unusual subject in that London isn't one of the more common places to find jobs - so if you want to get a job near to your home or your university this might be worth thinking about.
What about your long term prospects?
Looking further ahead, below is a rough guide for what graduates went on to earn.
Childhood and youth studies
The graph shows median earnings of graduates who achieved a degree in this subject area one, three and five years after graduating from here.
£30k
£32k
£34k
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.
Sociology
The graph shows median earnings of graduates who achieved a degree in this subject area one, three and five years after graduating from here.
£25k
£25k
£29k
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.
Social work
The graph shows median earnings of graduates who achieved a degree in this subject area one, three and five years after graduating from here.
£30k
£32k
£34k
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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Course location and department:
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Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF):
We've received this information from the Department for Education, via Ucas. This is how the university as a whole has been rated for its quality of teaching: gold silver or bronze. Note, not all universities have taken part in the 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.
Have a question about this info? Learn more here
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
Have a question about this info? Learn more here
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