The Westminster government is to commission a national review of suicides at UK universities but has stopped short of creating a legal duty of care for students.
Higher education minister Robert Halfon has warned that he may ask the English regulator, the Office for Students, to create a new registration condition for universities on student mental health, if not enough progress is made on the issue in the coming months.
Speaking at a Westminster Hall debate called after a petition started by the families of young people who killed themselves while studying at university collected almost 130,000 signatures, Mr Halfon said he was “confident that higher education can meet this challenge but I have made it absolutely clear that if this response is not satisfactory, I will go further.”
Mr Halfon said that he wants to see progress in three areas: identifying students at risk early, creating more personalised and compassionate academic processes and sharing lessons from existing reviews of student suicides.
