Education, Childhood, Youth and Sport

As well as giving you a qualification, your OU studies in education, childhood, youth or sports will help you connect with schools and communities. Our networks – built on decades of successful projects with partners ranging from local early years groups to foreign governments – will give you unique access to the social groups we study, and we will engage you with those communities by giving you tasks and projects to carry out with young people. Whatever your lifestyle, ambitions or starting point (an A level, a GCSE or no qualifications at all), you can start your learning journey in education, childhood, youth or sport with us.

Our pioneering sport and fitness curriculum enables distance learning of sport and fitness through a variety of innovative tools such as apps, interactives and augmented reality, helping the teachers, trainers and all who study with us to understand how to make sport training and healthy exercise more effective for everyone.

Our courses in early childhood, and childhood and youth, will help you explore how children and young people’s lives are shaped by a range of experiences, so that you can see the world through their eyes, provide a supportive environment for learning and help them develop and grow as people. And our courses in education will help you understand how children learn so that you can develop effective ways to support their learning.

We offer both undergraduate and masters level courses that will enable you to develop your theoretical understanding and professional practice to the highest level.In our MA in Education and MA in Childhood & Youth you will become familiar with some of the theories and debates that underpin learning.Our BA Hons Education Studies (Primary) degree will enable you to develop your understanding of policy and practice in primary education and our PGCE Wales provides the opportunity to qualify as a school teacher, combining distance study with in-school experience working with children and young people.

Whatever inspires you to study, we’ll help you find a course or qualification that fulfils your career plans or personal interests. You can study a single subject in our school or a combination of our subjects to create a degree course in the subjects that matter to you. You can also take your expertise and career to the next level via our postgraduate and research degree programmes.

We work continuously to ensure that our teaching and research is innovative and at the cutting-edge of developments in the sector ensuring that our students can succeed in their ambitions, and that both we and our students are making a positive contribution to society.

Our research contributes to national and global practices, policies and debates and we have a track record of collaborating with a range of stakeholders as we collectively tackle societal challenges and tackle the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Our global development work extends to the provision of technical assistance to ministries of education in low-middle income countries, as well as UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). We work with the BBC on projects such as the ground-breaking BBC documentary Child of Our Time, Fever Pitch: The Rise of the Premier League, Don’t Exclude Me, the more recent BBC Worldwide radio series Project 17; and many others.

The exciting thing about these collaborations and partnerships is that we bring back our learning and our knowledge from those partnerships to further enhance our students’ education with us.