Law and Politics (with Professional Placement Year)

Designed to help you attain many of the skills required to complete the practice elements of the Solicitors Qualifying Exam (SQE), Law at Bath Spa develops your legal knowledge, research and professional skills.

This innovative Law degree is informed by the new regulatory framework for the training of solicitors and barristers, and meets the requirements of the Bar Standards Board. Gain a broad understanding of legal systems and criminal law. You'll expand your knowledge to topics such as international law, media and entertainment law, and cybercrime. In your final year, you’ll hone your practice skills in our law clinic, or undertake a law research project.

Learn how to be a lawyer in practice and understand the business of law, so that you can hit the ground running when you graduate. We recognise that many Law students don’t pursue a career in law and have built career planning into each strand of the course, with a focus on the growing number of roles that require related skill sets. These include roles in governance, risk management, advocacy, public policy, HR and finance.

Our innovative Politics degree has been designed to enable you to acquire specialised subject knowledge while developing practical and professional skills that you can apply to contemporary challenges, issues and debates.

What do people really mean when they say they’re not 'interested in politics'? Political action or inaction shapes our lives every day, in ways which are often invisible, or which seem remote or impenetrable. We know that it matters, but we can also feel removed from it: the vast sums of money spent on elections and then nothing seems to change, the narrowness of so much debate and the pointlessness of point scoring, getting power in order to keep it.

We want to try to get under the surface of all these assumptions and ask if it really has to be this way. We want to try to understand the politics of everyday life, as well as the major challenges of climate change, poverty and inequality, the imbalances of wealth and power nationally and internationally, and between elected governments and unelected corporations. Who decides: the local councillor, the member of parliament, or the chairman of the board?

More about the Professional Placement Year A Professional Placement Year (PPY), traditionally known as a sandwich year, is where you undertake a period of work with an external organisation for between 9-13 months. The placement occurs between your second and final years of undergraduate study. You can engage in multiple placements to make up the total time and are required to source the placement(s) yourself, with support from the Careers team.