Education programme structure and pathways

Gain a broad foundation on our general MSc Education or specialise your degree by choosing a pathway in an area relevant to your educational and professional goals.

Across the programme, you’ll consider key educational challenges and possibilities from a variety of theoretical, policy and practice perspectives. 

You’ll learn through a combination of lectures, student-led seminars and presentations, skills training and project work.

You will complete compulsory courses and choose from a range of option courses, totalling 120 credits. If you take up a specialist pathway, compulsory and option courses will reflect your specialism. The master's degree culminates in an independently researched dissertation for another 60 credits. 

Please note that courses, course content and pathways may change each year.

Pathways

MSc Education: General pathway

This pathway offers you a broad base in the field of education, which is an ideal foundation to work in education policy, research or practice, or to progress to doctoral study. You can focus on topics that appeal to you specifically through our range of option courses.

MSc Education: Early Childhood Practice and Froebel pathway

This pathway is for those interested in early childhood education who want to gain an advanced, critical understanding of Froebelian principles and other contemporary early years pedagogies.

MSc Education: Research pathway

This pathway equips students with essential applied quantitative and qualitative research skills and knowledge of the main traditions and paradigms in educational research. You can choose optional courses while gaining knowledge to conduct research in education, relevant for policy and practice.

MSc Education: Child and Adolescent Psychology pathway

This pathway takes a psychological perspective towards understanding development from infancy to adolescence. We focus on cognitive, social and emotional development, placing this within a broad understanding of educational theory and policy.

MSc Education: Philosophy of Education pathway

This pathway explores a range of philosophical issues in education practice, policy and research from a variety of international contexts, traditions and perspectives.

Teaching

Teaching on our compulsory courses consists mainly of lectures and related workshops. In the workshops, you will work with a tutor in small groups to make sense of the ideas and practices introduced in the lectures. We record all lectures on compulsory courses so you can listen to them again to further and deepen your understanding.

Across the programme, depending on which courses you take, teaching encompasses a range of formats. These include:

face-to-face and video lectures
guided readings
workshops
seminars
work-based placements
independent study
small-group meetings and one-on-one meetings with staff

You will work on both individual and group tasks throughout the programme. 

There are also a variety of research seminars run by staff and PhD students held throughout the year, which you may attend. 

Assessment

Assessments inform our teaching and support your learning. In all our courses, students receive feed-forward guidance about graded assessments.

Typically, each 10-credit course has a separate piece of graded assessment. Our 20-credit courses usually contain two pieces of graded coursework. We carefully distribute assessment points throughout the programme to spread student workload and allow enough time for learning within courses before assessment. 

We have a range of tasks designed to assess the academic and professional knowledge and skills we want our students to develop. Tasks include traditional essays (these will generally only make up part of the final grade), group presentations, digital portfolios that show engagement with education research and practice, collaborative video presentations using various forms of digital media, grades for class and online participation and course-related blogs.

Across the programme, we provide you with appropriate but supported degrees of freedom to choose the topics you wish to explore in your assessed tasks.  We want our tasks to be as meaningful as possible for students. As such, we regularly monitor and respond to students’ views on their courses’ assessment tasks. 

Learn from internationally-recognised leaders

Our staff are internationally recognised research leaders in their areas, so teaching is informed by the most up-to-date knowledge and thinking. Representing the interdisciplinary nature of education, staff come from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, including:

developmental psychology
the philosophy of education
quantitative and qualitative research in education
physical education and wellbeing
community education
child and youth studies
sociology and education policy
anthropology and education

Student support

We understand that masters programmes can be demanding and that new cultural and learning contexts may be challenging for students who come from a variety of backgrounds. To help manage social as well as academic needs, all students are allocated a Student Adviser in their first few weeks at Edinburgh. The Adviser will help guide you should any questions or challenges arise.

After almost twenty years in an industry I knew inside out, it was great to be challenged and to learn new things. My interest is founded in the educational attainment of looked after children, but has grown to include all aspects of inclusive education, young people in care and social work.
The MSc Education programme offered a wide range of classes, from research methods and ethics to educational philosophy and the nature of inquiry. All stretched me academically, as a mature student, but provided a great base to draw on when writing my dissertation.