Applied Criminology with Foundation Year, BSc

We look forward to meeting you for the first time during Welcome Week (week commencing 14 September 2026). You can view your course welcome timetable for this week at the top of this page.

You will attend of activities where you will be inducted into your course and the university. You will also be assigned (and speak with) your Personal Academic Tutor (PAT), who will provide you with academic and personal support and signpost you to other relevant departments for any additional help you may need.

Week commencing Monday 21 September 2026, the real work begins, as you start your first modules.

If you have any concerns about starting university, please do not fret, as this is perfectly normal. You will find the staff friendly, experienced and readily available to support you with your studies.

We know that choosing to embark on a degree course is a big commitment in time, energy and money and we assure you that we are fully committed to helping you to reach your goal.

Your Course

During Semester 1 you will complete the following modules:

The Big Picture

This module will help you discover where you fit into the big picture of both university life and the wider world, and in which you'll be introduced to the differences between university, school, and workplace training.

Exploring Justice

This module will explore the meaning of justice from a range of disciplinary perspective.

On both of these modules you will have the chance to meet and study with students on other foundation year courses.

​Most modules are taught using a mixture of lectures and seminars where your physical presence in class is expected. While lectures are more didactic in nature, seminars involve more individual or group-based exercises.

In Semester 2 you will go on to complete the following modules:

• Interdisciplinary Communication Skills
• Crime, Power and Society
• Your Journey to Success at CCCU (Transition into Level 4)
• 2 x 5 credit success modules

Blackboard

All your learning materials, lecture slides, reading lists, and assignment briefs will be available on Blackboard, our virtual learning environment. You'll be able to access Blackboard when you have set up your computing account and you will receive an introduction to Blackboard during Welcome Week. Make sure you familiarize yourself with the platform early—it will be your primary resource throughout your studies.

To help you prepare

There's lots you can do to prepare for your studies in criminology. We recommend that you start regularly reading about crime issues in newspapers and online with a critical viewpoint. Look at a selection of newspapers, especially broadsheets, and see how the same event has been reported in different publications.

There are lots of government and charity websites that have information about crime and criminal justice. Look at the Ministry of Justice and Home Office websites to learn about government policies in relation to crime. You can also find up-to-date crime statistics there and the latest figures on the prison population.

Check out the websites of reputable charitable organisations, such as the Howard League for Penal Reform, the Prison Reform Trust, INQUEST, Victim Support and the Restorative Justice Council.

We also suggest you visit our Learning Skills hub and look at some of the modules in the "Getting Started" section to help you prepare for University study.

Given you have worked very hard to get into University, there is nothing compulsory you have to do before you join us.

We recommend that you use the summer to prepare yourself for your transition to higher education and take some time to relax and rejuvenate.

Also your preparation doesn't have to be solely academic. Crime is all around us in news and popular culture so look at those films, documentaries and crime novels but see them in a different way.

Start thinking about the ways in which these represent crime in particular ways, or how they focus on particular crimes. What do they say about the police, or prisons or the courts? This is all relevant to thinking critically about crime and criminal justice - which is the basic building block of criminology.

If you are keen to get started, we recommend the following 'light' reads. Staff have picked a broad selection so you can choose the areas that interest you most:

• David Simon: The Corner and Homicide (books) and The Wire (TV Series on DVD)
• Hallie Rubenhold: The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper
• Truman Capote: In Cold Blood
• Phil Scraton: Hillsborough: The Truth
• Alexander Masters: Stuart: A Life Backwards
• Tim Pritchard: Street Boys
• Harriet Sergeant: Among the Hoods
• Steven King: The Green Mile
• James Ellroy: My Dark Places
• Anne Rule: The Stranger Beside Me
• Caitlin Davies: Bad Girls

Watch lots of crime series on TV and read lots of crime novels!

These are an important part of how the public see and understand crime so it's also important we know about them! The TV Series Life on Mars, for example, is a brilliant insight into police culture and changes to policing since the 1970s.

There are also some great documentaries about miscarriages of justice at the moment. Learn more about the Cardiff Three case, for example, by watching A Killing in Tiger Bay on iplayer or listen to the podcast Shreds on BBC Sounds which covers the same case. Or there are Netflix documentaries like 13th, Amanda Knox or Athlete A.

If terrorism and state crime are more your thing you can watch things like November 13: Attack on Paris or Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror, both also Netflix.

Criminology is a really broad discipline and this is one of the things our staff love about it. So immerse yourself in books and series that make you think about what crime is, how we see it as a society and how we respond to it in terms of crimes and victims.