It’s self-evident that students can’t reach their full potential if they don’t have the support they need.
The question is – what is the government doing to ensure that students get that support?
Anyone familiar with cross-sector initiatives led out of the Department for Education (and the other government departments that have looked after HE over the years) will be forgiven for casting a sceptical eye over its HE mental health implementation taskforce’s first stage report.
The department’s last go at something called a student mental health taskforce – which was focussed on transitions into higher education – was pretty much a clustershambles, taking almost four years (albeit over the Covid period) to produce little other than interminable minutes.
This isn’t quite as W1A – there’s some progress over the government’s student suicide review (including a ministerial letter to VCs urging involvement), some movement on the identification of students in need of support and an update on universities’ engagement with the University Mental Health Charter.
