AQA Exam Board

The main UK exam board for sociology has a functional website containing everything you'd expect for teachers (and students) - Specifications, past papers and mark schemes in particular.

OCR Exam Board

If you use the OCR Exam Board you'll find a range of useful materials to download from the Sociology section. These include the standard AS / A2 Specifications and Research Report guide, but there are also materials relating specifically to teaching each of the AS modules - lesson plans, reading lists and web links.

WJEC

The Home page of the Welsh Exam Board.

CIE Board

Unlike the main UK Exam Boards, Cambridge International are still able to offer AS and A2 as both standalone qualifications and as a complete A-level (something you can read a bit more about here). There's also a Wiki created by CIE students and the official CIE AS and A-level Sociology Coursebook (modesty forbids me naming myself as the author. Oh.)

Study Skills

Mix of PowerPoint and Word resources covering aspects of essay-writing, evaluation and revision.

Delivery Guides

This set of resources from the OCR Exam Board is designed to support teaching and learning for their A-Level Specification. The Guides cover the complete Specification in terms of Modules and offer a combination of student tasks and activities designed to further their understanding through different forms of active learning. If you teach Culture and Identity or Globalisation and the Digital World there are also Lesson Elements (activities to you and me) that complement the Guides.

Simply Sociology

This new (2022) site features a range of Guides to various sociological perspectives, concepts and theories across a number of syllabus areas (family, culture, crime, stratification etc.). Each Guide is focused on a specific topic and discusses it in varying amounts of detail using clearly-delineated sections (such as Definitions, Examples and Criticisms). A useful site if you want to extend your students depth of thinking and involvement.

Discover Sociology

A range of free a-level resources, from the British Sociological Association, that covers the main Specification areas (family, education, methods...) and more.

The resources are mainly designed for classroom use and each is built around some form of short exercise / lesson suggestion, such as a simple experiment, article to read or video to watch.

Twynham School

Chris Thompson's site contains a range of AS (Family and Education) and A2 resources (Crime and Deviance, Power and Politics, Theory, Research Methods) aimed at the AQA Specification. These include podcasts, PowerPoint slide sets, quizzes, exam questions and blog posts containing notes, commentaries and links to a range of contemporary research. There's lots to explore here and you could do worse than spend some time interacting with the site.

Earlham Sociology

This site, created by teacher Russell Hagger, aims "to provide a fairly comprehensive set of materials for several of the modules currently offered in the AQA AS and A2 Sociology specification". The first available module, Education and Training, is split into four sections:
1. PowerPoint presentations, covering areas like educational achievement and class.
2. Teaching Notes that provide a comprehensive range of information coupled with classroom activities.
3. Essays that illustrate how to answer exam questions in terms of a general plan and illustrative text.
4. Assignments and Discussion Topics that provide teachers with a ready-made set of resources that can be used within the classroom or set as homework.

There's also a Links page for the sites used or referenced within the materials.

Year 12 and 13 Sociology

Two teacher-created sites filled with resources designed to support the teaching of Year 12 and Year 13 sociology:

Year 12 Sociology: Resources for family and education

Year 13 Sociology: Resources for Crime, Theory, Methods, Beliefs / Religion

Lancaster University On-Line Papers

One of the few (British) Universities to use the Web for anything other than advertising, the Sociology Department has, since January 1999, published a series of On-Line Papers. As you might expect, these are aimed at an undergraduate audience, but a number of papers are (surprisingly) accessible to an A-level audience. The range of materials reflects the particular interests of members of the Department, but there are papers on aspects of globalisation, production and consumption, work and leisure (the enticingly entitled "Home from home?: a research note on recreational caravanning"), with more topics planned. The presentation is nothing special (it's probably best to print any papers you want to use), but access to a potentially-useful source of up-to-date research is something that should be welcomed.

Sociology

A veritable cornucopia of interesting material can be found here, from AS modules (Families, Wealth, Poverty and Welfare and Methodology) to A2 modules such as Crime, Religion and Social stratification (with detours through areas such as the Sociology of Bananas - you can learn something about power by eating bananas). There's a broad mix of information, advice, notes, quizzes and PowerPoint presentations on-site (and then some - too much to list in any great detail). In fact, there's so much going-on here it's going to take you some time to view it all, but whether you're a teacher or student it will certainly repay the time you spend on-site.

CSI Briefing Papers

The Oxford-based Centre for Sociological Investigation has an archive of 35 Briefing Papers, ranging across social inequality, family life and crime, that are a potentially useful resource for Sociology teachers.and students. Each Briefing runs to just 4 pages and is packed with statistical analysis and insightful commentary.

Social Science Space

The "social science bites"  section of this site contains a large number of podcast interviews (they've just reached 50 at the time of writing) on a wide range of topics, some of which will be useful for sociology teachers and students. You might, for example, find some or all of the following interesting:

Steven Lukes on Émile Durkheim

John Brewer on C. Wright Mills

Peter Lunt on Erving Goffman

Peter Ghosh on Max Weber and ‘The Protestant Ethic’

Linda Woodhead on the New Sociology of Religion

Angus Deaton on Health and Inequality

Kate Pickett on the Case for Equality

Angela McRobbie on the Illusion of Equality for Women

Danny Dorling on Inequality

Each podcast page also has a complete transcript of the interview.

Educational Research

Tanya Hope has contributed to numerous A-level texts and this site exists to: "...disseminate my educational and sociological research in an effort to support an ethos of academic sharing". At present you'll find original research material (the Educational Maintenance Allowance material could be useful for OCR students doing the Research Report...) and the promise of free teaching resources, book reviews and links.

Joseph Rowntree Foundation

It's difficult to know where to begin with this site since it contains, in its own words "several hundred research summaries", all of which can be browsed on-line or downloaded in pdf format. You can search for articles by keyword (from "Abuse" to "Youth") or category (for example, social policy research). There's too much available on the site to describe in a few words so, if you want up-to-date information on a wide range of sociological topics, I'd be inclined to give Mr. Rowntree a visit...

Theory.org

Although I've mentioned David Gauntlett's site in the Mass Media section, it's worth mentioning again here because of an interesting feature of the site that's well-worth checking out - "Trading Cards". These are basically revision cards featuring an outline of a writer or theory plus a couple of strengths / weaknesses. The cards are attractively designed and might prove useful as either a revision aid or classroom display.

The Sociology Shop

The Shop is an interesting concept, in terms of both design and content. The basic idea (I think...) is that since Sociology knows no boundaries, neither does The Shop - which is why you'll find a range of "rooms" devoted to "Sociology" in it's minimal academic sense - articles and links on crime and education which will be of specific interest to A2 teachers and students (there's a particularly useful section on Peter Berger's contribution to the sociology of knowledge) and "Sociology" in its widest sense - rooms devoted to critical thinking skills, conceptual tools and humour. The site's clearly a labour of love and it's none the worse for so being...

The National Archives

A nice site to browse and a lot of information packed into it's many pages. There's not, in truth, anything of immediate interest to A-level Sociologists, but there's plenty of general interest stuff (some of which is stunningly well-presented) and it contains the potential for search material on a variety of project-related information.

Sociology Review

Sociology Review is probably the standard journal for A-level students, even though it's heavily biased towards the AQA Specification, many of the articles could serve as useful undergraduate introductions and there's precisely no competition for such an accolade. However, for all its faults (such as the same old names appearing and reappearing) it's a useful source for teachers that's just about worth the hefty subscription price.

Thinking Allowed

BBC radio programme presented by Laurie Taylor featuring interviews with leading sociologists (and some following sociologists it has to be said). Always worth checking out - and have a look through the archive too.

The Sociology Teacher

The British Sociological Association's rival publication to Sociology Review that has now sadly bitten the dust (probably because they didn't ask me to write anything for them either. Although that may be coincidental, I'm starting to sense a pattern), the archive of 11 editions is now available for free.

Sociology Study Site

This site, created to support an American Sociology text, has a load of very interesting summaries of classic sociological / social psychological studies plus a few other bits-and-bobs that may or may not be interesting. Since it's basically a ghost site - last updated 2002 - you may need to visit while you still can.

Sociology Resources

A later (2014) version of the Sociology Study Site - same book, different version - with a whole new range of not-quite-so-classic sociological and social psychological research articles. Useful but not essential.