University leaders and staff, as a rule, feel a sense of responsibility for their students’ wellbeing and recognise that the ways that institutional policies and pedagogical practices play out can sometimes cause students distress, or even harm.
But university representatives have thus far resisted the idea that universities should be subject to a statutory duty of care towards their students. And skills and further and higher education minister Robert Halfon has supported their position – in a letter to MPs, he said “this government does not believe that [a statutory duty of care] is the most effective way to improve outcomes for students” and argued that a general duty of care already exists in common law, and a specific one in relation to protected characteristics through the Equality Act of 2010.
Halfon pointed instead to a raft of initiatives including a national review of student suicides, and a new higher education mental health taskforce chaired by student support champion and Nottingham Trent University vice chancellor Edward Peck which will set out to develop a new university-student commitment by the end of the current calendar year.
Campaigning groups – including those representing parents of students who have died by suicide – are bitterly disappointed at this outcome. And at the recent Westminster Hall debate on the topic, members of parliament – many of whom reported that a student in their constituency had died by suicide – characterised the attitude of universities as defensive, and the government’s argument that a general duty of care already exists as simplistic.
