Student mental health: Humen charity unveils league table ranking UK universities by levels of support

A men’s mental health charity has created a league table aiming to rank major UK universities by the mental health support they provide to students.

The charity Humen said its new ranking was a response to its concerns about student welfare, especially during the pandemic, and would be repeated annually.

Humen founder River Hawkins said: “Suicide is the biggest killer of under-35s in the UK. Then, during the pandemic, there were a lot of student suicides and the way that the universities dealt with it was not the best.

“So I wanted to create a league table so that current students, prospective students and their families have a clear, simple way to understand how well they are going to be supported when making their choices for university.”

The league table assesses UK universities which have 10,000 students or more and was created through combining information secured through Freedom of Information requests with a survey of around 7,000 students.

It assesses five measures, including the spend on mental health provision per head and student satisfaction with support services.

The charity said it found huge variation in provision, such as spending per student of between £3 and £70.

The University of Reading made the top spot, although Mr Hawkins said that no university “scored completely full marks so I think that there is always room to improve”.

Professor Peter Miskell, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education and Student Experience at the University of Reading, said: “At Reading, we recognise that students may face many challenges which could be detrimental to their mental health and, of course, to their studies. We therefore provide access to a wide range of emotional and practical support. We have a team of qualified mental health advisors, counsellors and welfare officers, together with advice programmes and online services.

“We are pleased to see this work recognised in this new league table but have no doubt that there is always room for improvement.”

The University of Birmingham was placed at the bottom of the table.

A spokesperson for the university said: “We take our responsibility to students very seriously and provide a comprehensive range of wellbeing and support services. We invest more than £2m annually on staff and partner services who directly support students with their mental health and wellbeing.”

Birmingham was also among a number of universities which questioned the methodology behind the league table.

The spokesperson said: “We do not recognise the data in this league table or how it was derived and believe it is at best misleading. It does not reflect the significant investment the University has made or service enhancements seen in recent years.”

Others criticised the sample size of the survey, saying this represented a tiny proportion of students.

Mr Hawkins said the survey sample size “aligns with other highly-respected academic league tables”, adding: “The research results are freely available and the charity urges more universities to get in touch with us to better understand their score and provide students with the support they desperately need.”

Successive studies by the Office for National Statistics have found that male university students are more likely to die by suicide than their female counterparts. Humen has pledged to open 100 support spaces for men in university towns over the next five years.

The publication of the league table comes after a NationalWorld investigation revealed more than half of universities did not know how many of their students had died by suicide in the past five years. Mr Hawkins said NationalWorld’s findings were “interesting but not surprising”.

A separate study published earlier this month by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) and Advance HE found that university students are much more likely to feel lonely than the general population.

Mr Hawkins said going to university was an “extremely terrifying” time for some and he believed there were instances of students taking their own lives which could have been prevented.

He said: “There’s a huge issue around students, young people falling through the gap in the healthcare system when they go to university because they may still be with their home GP or they may not register with a GP in their university town and they are also just not around the support network that they may have.

“So it’s a huge issue in terms of students slipping through the healthcare gap with that transition of going to uni as well.”

Last week, the Government announced a £3m investment to better join up mental health services to prevent students falling through the gaps at university. Mr Hawkins said Humen was calling for an investment 100 times larger.

• Help is available for anyone affected by this issue. Papyrus offers support and advice to young people up to 35 years. Contact Papyrus HopelineUK on 0800 068 4141, text 07860 039967 or email [email protected]. You can also call the Samaritans for free on 116 123, email them at [email protected], or visit samaritans.org to find your nearest branch.