We’re delighted that our undergraduate Social and Public Policy teaching team has won the Social Policy Association’s Policy Press Outstanding Teaching Award 2020! This is a competitive UK-wide teaching award that is open to all UK Higher Education institutions and is awarded by the Social Policy Association, the leading professional association for social policy across the UK.

‘This award recognises excellence in social policy teaching and will be granted to nominees who have made a significant and valuable contribution to developing best practice and/or innovative practice in teaching and/or progressing student learning and engagement in social policy’.

The Social and Public Policy teaching team, led by Dr Mark Wong, offers a range of courses that reflect their world-leading research expertise, particularly in housing and urban policy, poverty and inequality, welfare and wellbeing, public health, youth, and technology and big data.

The team has demonstrated excellence in pedagogical practices, such as promoting active learning and support students to develop critical reflection and policy changes to address real-world challenges in local and international contexts.

Their many achievements include co-designing a new smartphone application, UniCom, to improve timeliness and frequency in feedback, contributing to the design of a virtual reality app to visualise housing and health inequality trends data used in teaching, gaining 100% overall satisfaction in the 2019 NSS, and have climbed from 14th to 1st place in the UK for Social Policy.

The award was accepted at a virtual ceremony on 11 December by Mark who said: ‘As the programme director, I feel incredibly proud and honoured to represent our UG teaching team to receive this prestigious award. It truly is a celebration of the excellence we have achieved across the board, from active learning pedagogy to developing cutting-edge technology, to improving the student experience. This award is a recognition of our exemplary teaching practice in the discipline. Above all, I hope this will be an inspiration for all Social Policy programmes in the UK to celebrate innovation in teaching and learning, which will truly make a difference for the next generation of policy-makers and world changers.’

Head of Urban Studies, Professor Sharon Wright, added: ‘I am so excited that the Social Policy teaching team in Urban Studies have received this prestigious award from the Social Policy Association!  I feel honoured and proud to work with such lovely colleagues – administrators, GTAs, tutors and lecturers - who pull together and work so hard to make sure that students are enjoying their experience of learning about social policy at Glasgow.’

First published: 14 December 2020

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SPAs 2020 Award Winners