A(nother) new competence framework emerges

It is designed to enhance the ability of staff across the sector to support students in distress, and comes as a result of work to establish a “minimum standard” of knowledge and skills that can be expected of staff in non-clinical student-facing roles.

The theory here is that students struggling with mental health often first approach teaching staff, personal tutors, course administrators, or accommodation and security teams rather than specialist support services – but that places a responsibility on non-specialist staff to recognise signs of distress and offer assistance, which may exceed their current training or confidence levels.

So the idea is that the framework provides a common understanding across the sector of the skills, approach, and knowledge that student-facing staff need in order to respond to those students about whom they are becoming concerned in a helpful and safe way.

This is very much about the “noticing” thing – and in the taskforce’s deliberations is posited as an addition to, or in some cases alternative to, other approaches like learner analytics.

Will it work? The use of “minimum” is interesting in the accompanying text. When the ForThe100 campaign is calling for a “duty of care”, it’s often misinterpreted as some sort of in loco parentis thing – but in reality what they’re calling for is for minimum standards to apply to non-specialist roles.

So in a sense, the establishment of minimum standards is great news. But a minimum is only meaningful if everyone is meeting it – and both DfE and OfS have repeatedly refused to countenance making these minimums mandatory.

That’s interesting – because while the duty of care that universities have over students depends on the “specific facts and context” of a given situation or case, consumer protection law (which is being souped up and added to) is partly about reasonable care and skill in providing a service – judged according to the standards expected in the relevant industry.

Does the publication of the framework represent the standards expected in this industry? You’d forgive students and their parents for assuming it does, especially in roles that tend to be labelled up as partly “pastoral”. After all:

This framework acts, therefore, as an exposition of threshold expectations for all student-facing staff in responding to students in distress.

Of course even if moves were made to ensure that all student-facing staff were up the required standards, there would still need to be enough of them with enough contact with enough students – and much of the sector seems to be cutting staff now.

And the reality is that lots of students have next-to-no relationship with university staff anyway. That’s partly about the realities of some students’ situations – and partly about their confidence to approach. As such the lack of focus on what sorts of interventions need to made to improve students’ understanding of and ability to “reach out” or even interact with the staff that are supposed to spotting is frustrating. Students need to know the codes as well.

Another deeply frustrating aspect of the list of roles in the blurb is that it doesn’t mention students’ unions – not so much in relation to their staff (although there are plenty of SU staff – especially those in SU advice roles – who tend to be forgotten about when university training programmes of this ilk are rolled out), but in relation to peer support.

Elected welfare roles, wellbeing reps inside clubs and student societies, student support reps – pretty much every university has a whole bunch of students in roles who are often much more likely to be approached by or need to notice other students in distress than staff, and probably should have more. There’s nothing in the competence framework that we shouldn’t be able to trust students themselves with.

The other issue is bandwidth. There are, in truth, few universities who’ve done anything yet with the other big output from the taskforce so far – the guidance on compassionate communications, and its commitment that “in the rare circumstance that a specific message is likely to have a seriously negative or life-changing impact, this should be delivered in person.”

Once you get past the word “rare” (itself a potential deep misunderstanding of the fear that lots of students have of authority and/or failure), you do have to do some hard yards in multiple teams to both establish what would count (with reference to what the university “knows” about a given student, and by talking to some of them), and then operationalise the “in-person” thing. And honestly? There’s little evidence of that happening so far.

To be fair, UKAT plans to map the framework to its professional advising and tutoring framework, AMOSSHE plans to use the framework to guide its training strategy for non-clinical staff, CUBO sees the framework as a key benchmarking tool and SEDA plans to integrate the framework and the compassionate comms one into its fellowship criteria.

But the biggest problem I suspect remains resistance. I don’t want to be dismissive of where the resistance to this sort of stuff comes from – but it’s real and active. The age old “we offer all of our staff training on X” is simply not the same as “all our staff are trained on X”, and while moving to the latter will need careful work to overcome the resistance, that is where universities need to be.

I’m sure plenty of new starters roll their eyes at all the compulsory (fire) safety, data protection and freedom of information, information security and equality and diversity interventions. And maybe it is the case that when entered into voluntarily, people are more enthusiastic. But unless it’s compulsory, one is left assuming that the message from universities to students is “we’ll try, but we don’t want to be held to account for this”. And the signal it send to staff is that it’s optional to notice and it’s not everyone’s responsibility to care.