Universities are attempting to understand the increasingly complex needs of a diversifying student body.
Alongside this good work, they must proactively engage with the public to communicate its importance – and the evidence that supports it – or the narrative will always be seized and controlled by bad-faith actors.
In February 2022, Universities UK, Unite Students, GuildHE, and Independent HE established a new taskforce with government departments, sector agencies, NUS, accommodation providers, charities and police, and student advisory panels. Chaired by Nic Beech, vice chancellor of Middlesex University, its work has been looking to reduce the harms of student drug consumption.
This followed a number of preventable drug-related student deaths in autumn 2020, reports that student drug use rose during the pandemic, and a rise in students with poor mental health – some of whom report using recreational drugs to manage it. The Home Office and the Department of Health and Social Care also commissioned Dame Carol Black to chair an independent review of drugs and the harms they cause. The detailed report Black produced, published in two parts between 2021 and 2022, advocated a need for a support-centred approach when dealing with drug use. The UUK taskforce also committed its approach would to being firmly based on evidence-led harm reduction.
