I'm at Essex, what I will say about the first year is I don't have much love for the first yearcourse structure. There's only one module on actual psychology topics, each lecture covers a whole topic and you get one 2 hour lecture per week. You'll also have tutorials for this module, but most of them are study skills and imo are useless. If you've done a-level psychology, especially aqa a, you'll find this stuff quite repetitive. Research methods again is an hour lecture per week, very similar to a level. Also a one hour lab class/tutorial class each week. You then have Statistics for psychologists, which for us is mostly a two hour lecture and a lab class each week , the lecturer is really good and I've gotta say, thats probably the module i enjoy the most, never thought i'd say that!
Then for the fourth module you get a choice of a list of modules from different department you pick from there what you study.