Will Labour regulate universities over mental health? Who knows

Richard Smith from Unite Students rattled through some of the great work that they’ve been doing particularly on ethnicity and belonging in halls, and Student Minds’ Rosie Tressler gave a clear and helpful explanation of its charter – even if she also had to uncomfortably field a leftfield allegation that she was the “stand in” student on the panel when an audience member noticed that gap and raised it.

The star of the show was due to be shadow universities minister Matt Western, who reminded his audience he’d been in his post for over two years – which did rather raise expectations that he may have actual proposals by now. Alas, it wasn’t to be.

Having reflected on the visits he’d been doing to universities engaging with students, Western reminded the room that his colleagues in health have promised to recruit more mental health staff.

In his own portfolio, he also identified the rising costs of rent, student inflation and isolation and loneliness as causes of concern that might be exacerbating the crisis. But while the diagnosis was clear, the treatment on offer was conspicuous by its abscence:

Hopefully I’ve given you a little flavour there of some of the things that Labour would want to do. But it is a real crisis. It’s a crisis in wider society, but it’s an intensely serious crisis, I think, in the higher education sector.

Yes. I think we can all agree that when there’s an “intensely serious” crisis in a sector, it’s those “little flavours” that give us real reassurance. Who needs actual policy?

To be fair, Western had raised the role of regulation in the crisis, suggesting that OfS might be caused to turn its mind to the issues:

But I do think not enough is being done, I really do not understand how we can have had a regulator called the Office for Students that really has not given enough priority to these sorts of issues amongst the student body, because it’s been quite evident that a regulator needed to be looking at best practice and what should be done across the sector.

The problem was that the spectre of a condition of registration naturally caused Universities UK CEO Vivienne Stern’s knee to jerk:

I think the OfS should focus on quality and access… The idea that you can regulate in this area fills me with a little bit of horror.

“Horror” was perhaps a strong word to describe a regulator setting expectations for practice over the providers it regulates – particularly given the well-evidenced links between mental health and access, and the importance of mental health considerations in pedagogy – but there was a vague justification:

It’s really, really difficult. They’re not healthcare settings… though it doesn’t mean they don’t have a responsibility, it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t stick up to look after their communities. But at a certain point, you have to, you have to acknowledge that there are limits to what a university can do… so my plea both to our current government and to Matt, is if you can’t help us [with funding] at least stop making it worse… make sure that the scarce resources that are available to support students are going on supporting students, not to satisfy an increasingly burdensome regulatory mechanism.

Given UUK’s public role in life appears to be resist all regulation all of the time, it was then a little odd that Stern asked the audience member who had asked the question to please “not quote any of the above, despite the fact that you’re in fact a journalist” – even odder given that Bhattacharya had opened the event by warning the panel that “whatever you say will live on in infamy on YouTube forever.” I didn’t ask it and I’m lifting this from YouTube (I was away at a housing thing), so I figure me including it here is OK.

It also suggests that inside OfS towers, Director for Fair Access and Participation John Blake has managed to create a student risk register that mentions mental health several times and a guidance note that demands that providers consider “how they can improve the mental health of their students” without the CEO of UUK or the shadow universities minister even noticing. Crafty!

The exchange had left Western in a fuddle. He knows he needs to signal that things will be better under Labour, and his “the clue is in the name” line on OfS has been garnering smiles on the circuit – but he’s also been reassuring sector audiences on regulatory burden. So the response to Bhattacharya’s subsequent question on whether mental health should be “core” to OfS had to tread a fine line:

I didn’t mean it to be core… I’m just saying it’s the Office for Students, what is the purpose of this body? If it is an office for students, then it should actually have the concerns of students at heart. Now, I’m not saying … it should be a core, central plank of what the OfS should be doing. Far from it… However, I do think there is practice that needs to be in place that should be followed by institutions, and for them to adhere within certain timelines.

So if it’s an “intensely serious” crisis that requires time-bound commitments to introduce practice, is it core or not?

I guess what I’m saying with mental health, is that I would expect that all institutions have good practice in terms of the approach to mental health, sexual harassment, and assault on campus. I’m not saying that it should necessarily not be within OfS, but I would like to believe that all institutions will have protocols in place. Now who actually ensures that they are in place, I’m not sure. I’m not necessarily saying it should be the OfS. But we must make sure that there are no gaps so that there is not a risk. It’s not just down to oh, you happen to be at the wrong institution. They didn’t have a protocol in place, we do need to make sure these things happen. So Vivienne’s right, it’s not really for a regulator to be doing that. But we do need to ensure that institutions are doing the right thing.

I’ve listened back to that paragraph several times now, and I’m still none the wiser. Maybe the problem was that Labour haven’t thought through how it might oversee or scrutinise effective mental health practice in universities:

I haven’t, we haven’t thought through kind of what… how this should be managed, how this should be introduced, overseen, scrutinised whatever.

We might have imagined that Western would point to progress in Wales, where (Labour) Education Minister Jeremy Miles has been overseeing the inclusion of a core condition of registration on student and staff wellbeing into the new Commission for Tertiary Education and Research’s regulatory framework, given it will…

…require the Commission to set out clear expectations for universities and colleges regarding the effectiveness of their policies, services, and processes for supporting and promoting student and staff well-being, welfare, and safety.

He might also have pointed to the Welsh (Labour) government’s significant and wide ranging commitments to a common framework for mental health support across the tertiary sector, support for university-NHS partnerships, the embeddding mental health training and suicide-safer approaches into university policies and practices.

Or maybe he could have reflected on the Welsh (Labour) government’s commitment to timely and consistent data on the extent of mental health issues within each student body, or its commitment to work to ensure that providers and student representatives work together on addressing mental health issues arising from placements. But he didn’t.

The chair closed the session by suggesting that the discussion had been “jam packed”. Jam tomorrow, that is.