We are a leading Faculty of Social Sciences and our rankings reflect this across our subject areas. We're ranked Top 5 in the UK for Education, 1st in Scotland for Criminology, and Top 10 in the UK for Social Policy (Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2023).

As a Faculty we deliver an outstanding programme of professional development; promote postgraduate research, and facilitate creative opportunities for postgraduate students to interact and gain widespread experience. We support a strong research ethos with many staff having outstanding international research records in our seven core research areas and three related centres, all of which address key issues in society today. We also have an established international reputation for our research work on social gerontology, social responses to dementia, children and young people, child welfare and protection, families and relationships, problem solving justice, women in prisons, qualitative research with a variety of service users, teacher agency and the school curriculum, professional education, inclusionary policy and governance, housing studies, minorities experiences of social services and exclusion, social and ethnic identity and quantitative longitudinal analysis of large scale social survey data sets.