The Social Policy Awards 2025: It’s nomination time!

By Dr Hayley Bennett, Awards Portfolio holder, SPA Executive

The Social Policy Association’s purpose is to advance the teaching, research, and dissemination of knowledge in the field of social policy. We support and celebrate good research and the vital activities people undertake that keep our social policy community thriving. One way we do this is through the Social Policy annual awards. In this quite functional blog, I outline some details about our SPA awards. All on the SPA exec warmly encourage you to make nominations.

Why does the SPA give out awards?

The SPA awards aim to:

1) Advance the interests of the SPA and its members through increased reach and status

2) Recognise and endorse the work of academics who are both researching and teaching social policy, and who as SPA members contribute to advancing the discipline

3) Recognise and endorse the work of individuals and organisations who as social policy practitioners and/or advocates, are using academic work produced by the social policy academic community and/or are working with academics to promote the public understanding of social policy

What are the categories?

We have six categories of awards, each with their own specific aim, eligibility criteria, and nomination process. These are:

How does the award process work?

Each year the Social Policy Association (SPA) calls for nominations for its annual SPA Awards. All (excluding the doctoral researcher award, and the CUP awards relating to the three journals; JSP, SP&S & JCISP) require nominations to be made for the judges to consider and decide on a winner.

The winners are announced at the SPA Annual Conference in July, and many of the awards are kindly sponsored by the SPA, Policy Press, and Cambridge University Press.

Prior to the announcement at the conference dinner, there’s around a 7-month long process where we start readying ourselves for nominations, arranging the judging panel, and preparing the long and short lists for the journal prizes. For the journal article awards this involves taking very long lists of all published work from the previous year in each journal and creating short lists for our judges to agree a winning publication.

There are established rules that guide the awards process, including an agreement that the awards are made on the decision of the SPA-appointed judging panel, (that comprises of four judges appointed by the Executive to serve for 3 years) and normally includes:

The SPA President
1 judge drawn from outside the academic community
2 judges appointed from SPA membership

When can I nominate?

Nominations for the Social Policy Awards are now open. The deadline for nominations is the end of Monday 3rd March 2025.

Who can I nominate?

You’ll need to check each of the awards for specific details to ensure your nominee meets the criteria of that award. Our website has information on each of the awards. If you’re not quite sure, you can email me (Hayley.Bennett@ed.ac.uk) for an informal discussion.

There are some general rules to remember. If you make a nomination, you must do so with the full knowledge of the person being nominated. Many of the awards require the nomination to be made by an SPA member (sometimes more than one). Some awards, such as the doctoral research award, require self-nomination at the time of submitting your paper for the annual conference. Current members of the judging panel are not eligible to nominate and the SPA Exec members are also limited in which of the awards they can make nominations.

Who won last year?

In July 2024 we announced the winners for six of the awards at the SPA annual conference dinner at Glasgow City Chambers:

Outstanding Achievement in Social Policy Award: Jochen Clasen, Emeritus Professor of Comparative Social Policy, University of Edinburgh.

Excellence in Doctoral Research Award: Ewan Robertson, Teaching Fellow in Comparative Social Policy, University of Edinburgh, for: “Puzzling over Powering? Explaining In-Work Benefit Trajectories in France and the United Kingdom, 1990s – 2020s”

The Richard Titmuss Book Award: Sharon Wright, Professor of Social Policy, University of Glasgow, for: “Women and Welfare Conditionality Lived Experiences of Benefit Sanctions, Work and Welfare”

Cambridge University Press Awards for Excellence in Social Policy Scholarship:

– Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy: Valon Hasanaj, for: The shift towards an eco-welfare state: growing stronger together. 2023; 39(1): 42-63. doi:10.1017/ics.2023.2

– Social Policy and Society: Charlotte Pearson, Nick Watson, Richard Brunner, Jane Cullingworth, Shaffa Hameed, Nathaniel Scherer, and Tom Shakespeare, for: Covid-19 and the Crisis in Social Care: Exploring the Experiences of Disabled People in the Pandemic. 2023; 22(3): 515-530. doi:10.1017/S1474746422000112

– Journal of Social Policy: Catherine Needham, Kerry Allen, Emily Burn, Kelly Hall, Catherine Mangan, Hareth Al-Janabi, Warda Tahir, Sarah Carr, Jon Glasby, Melanie Henwood, and Steve Mckay, for: How do you Shape a Market? Explaining Local State Practices in Adult Social Care. 2023; 52(3): 640-660. doi:10.1017/S0047279421000805

Final points!

I’d like to briefly draw attention to two awards. First, the Public Understanding of Social Policy Award. In previous years winners have included in 2023, Baron Prem Sikka, co-founder of, and Senior Adviser to, the Tax Justice Network (since 2002), and member of the House of Lords (since 2020). Many of you will have heard his excellent plenary talk last year at our conference at Strathclyde. In 2022, it was Jack Monroe, British food writer, journalist and activist known for campaigning on poverty issues, particularly hunger relief. In 2020, the winner was Baron Frank Field of Birkenhead. Previous iterations of this award, such as when it was called the Public Recognition Award in 2018, were awarded to the Guardian journalist, Aditya Chakrabortty.

This year we’ve kept the same name for the award but slightly altered the scope of this prize to ensure that it also encourages nominations for organisations and people (based outside academia) who engage in research collaborations or are valued partners for social policy research or policy change. Please do consider making nominations for activists, collaborators and others who you think deserve recognition for their work supporting or promoting social policy.

Second, the Policy Press Outstanding Teaching Award. We’re very fortunate to be an association with many members who undertake excellence in teaching. This award seeks to acknowledge those within our social policy community who take on and advance social policy teaching in our institutions and within the discipline more broadly. The award recognises sustained and substantial teaching activities and those who go above and beyond. We warmly welcome nominations for this award. Please do talk to your Head of Subject or School about a nomination (as they need to make the nomination).

That’s all for now, but if you’ve any questions please get in touch by following the various links on our webpages to find out the details of each award, or emailing me if you’ve a more specific question. Remember the 3^rd March deadline!

Thanks, Hayley (on behalf of the SPA Exec).