Our new Masters in Social and Public Policy: Expanding excellent distance learning at the University of York

For more than 10 years, the York Online Team has delivered excellent distance

learning programmes in the field of public policy, administration and management as well as international development. Based on these experiences and driven by our ambition to continuously improve the way we teach and support our students, we are today very proud and happy to officially launch our new MA in Social and Public Policy, which will be open to students from September 2016.

There have been two main reasons for this expansion of our programme catalogue:

1. Since we are part of the Department of Social Policy and Social Work, it seemed right to offer a programme with a strong, direct focus on social policy, to not only draw on the expertise of our own staff in this field but to also benefit from as well as contribute further to the outstanding reputation of the Department, which achieved the third place in last year’s Research Excellence Framework on research quality and is overall one of top ten social policy departments in the UK, according to the ‘Times and Sunday Times University Guide 2016’ and the Guardian University guide 2016.
2. Establishing this new programme enables us to reach new groups of students who wish to specialise in studying the interplay between public and social policy, and who wish to dedicate a substantive part of their studies to their Masters dissertation. 

To accommodate the latter, the new MA will differ from our other online programmes by being two years long (instead of three years for our other programmes; even though there exists the option on these three-year programmes to speed up the study process) and by focusing the second year on the preparation of an 18,000 words dissertation.  

If you are interested in this programme or know of people who may be, we would invite you to have a look at the new programme website that contains all relevant information on entry requirements, taught modules and the structured support available to you.

And please do not hesitate to get in touch, via spsw-online@york.ac.uk for any queries you may have.