This course offers a number of flexible full-time and part-time routes, and an innovative pathway for students wanting to focus on professional practice. We believe that matching well qualified, able and enthusiastic PhD and MPhil students with supervisors who have relevant experience, expertise, and research interests, makes a healthy research environment. To this end we design our procedures to give candidates as much information as possible about our research and to allow us to judge a candidate’s ability to undertake research at this level. Part-time options are also available. Our research record is well established in the fields of drugs, youth offending, disability studies, theories of welfare, gender and sexuality, child protection, family support and family justice, law and social work, community care, and health and social care. Recent work has been informed by a growing emphasis on issues of equal opportunities, social justice, poverty and social exclusion. We are committed to a wide range of interdisciplinary projects, collaborative projects with practice agencies and policy focused studies.