A warm welcome. This highly stimulating module encourages you to step outside of your comfort zone, be critical and meaningfully engage in current social policy debates. Most of you taking this course have already taken Introduction to Social Policy and many will go on to take our policy-related courses next year. These form a coherent multidisciplinary Social Policy offer. Others may be taking SC5001 as a ‘stand-alone’ course, and I hope it will be an interesting and topical subject to you all.