11 May 2022

Ben Lewis, Chair of AMOSSHE Wales

This article was originally published in Wonkhe

Poor mental health has, for everyone, obvious impacts on our life, and potentially the lives of those around us. For our students it can affect academic performance, and the desire to remain in higher education. There is a strong argument that young adults today are more likely to experience mental illness than the generations that came before. There are range of factors which place students at additional risk of experiencing poorer mental health, such as pressures from life changes such as moving where you live, money and academic pressures.

The isolation and disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic appears to have accelerated and exacerbated a trend which many of us have observed in recent years: students are presenting to their university with mental health concerns in greater numbers; they present with greater complexity; and increasingly often in states of advanced crisis and risk.

Welsh Government recognised and responded to this important issue by providing universities with additional funding specifically for mental health and wellbeing strategy development and implementation during 2020 and again in 2021. Student support services across Wales were able to use some of this funding to develop innovative ways of providing support, and offer more support to our students.

The questions now are, how do we ensure we can continue to adapt to meet the changing needs of students across Wales? How to do we build on partnerships with the NHS and third sector, which have worked so well through the Covid-19 public health crisis, to meet the mental health challenge?

This has been the focus of a sector-wide working group made up of Universities Wales, NUS Wales, ColegauCymru and AMOSSHE The Student Services Organisation, in consultation with the Wales Mental Health Alliance.  

Welsh Government’s preferred ‘no wrong door’ approach, advocated in their Programme for Government, requires joined-up action across health and education. Our work together has responded directly to this call.

The five underlying principles that the working group are asking Welsh Government to consider, in a paper published this week, are:

  1. Parity of experience: Students should be able to access a consistent standard of support, regardless of where they live and study. Whilst there may be some divergence in services available across Wales, there should be an agreed minimum expectation of support for any and all students.
  2. Appropriate and effective information sharing: In order to avoid students ‘falling through the gaps’ relevant bodies need to be enabled to share information as appropriate where that is in the patient/student’s interest.
  3. Clear roles, remits and responsibilities: students, institutions and public services need to understand and agree on the remit of support provision appropriate to different bodies. There needs to clarity on boundaries. For example, a common understanding that the role of education provider is primarily to support students in undertaking their studies and wherever possible remove barriers to academic achievement.
  4. Additional support for transitions - As young people progress along their educational journey transition and change is a regular state; for example as the student moves from school to college, college to university, from education to employment, or back into learning as adults. They may also move away from home, and thus away from their support structures and services. This can occur at the same time as being moved from support provided by CAMHS to adult services under the NHS. For learners with long-term conditions, or who are in crisis, this can exacerbate conditions or create new risks.
  5. Sustainable, long-term funding - Providing effective support for mental health and well-being requires a stable, long-term service offer. Many effective mental health support measures all entail some form of person-to-person interaction. Therefore, ad-hoc, project-based funding, whilst helpful in the short term in encouraging innovation, can be less impactful in this policy space. It affects staff retention in a job market where qualified mental health staff are in high demand and prevents service providers developing consistent support pathways

The sector has already begun to progress against some of these recommendations. As a result of earlier Welsh Government funding, delivered through a HEFCW, a new NHS Mental Health University Liaison Service is now supporting students across south-east Wales. The specialist clinical team responds to students who require an NHS assessment for moderate mental health problems or more complex long-standing mental health issues. They are based within student support services on university campuses to complement existing services.

This partnership has been developed by Cardiff­ University, Cardi­ff Metropolitan University, the University of South Wales, the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, and the NHS via Cardiff­ and Vale University Health Board. The service is accessed via a referral from a university’s Student Services department, NHS Adult Liaison Psychiatry, or any GP in the region.

There are opportunities for us in Wales to deliver something distinctive as we take this work further; to remove barriers to vital support, to resource that support in a fair and secure way; to provide staff in pressured and critical roles with the security they need; and ultimately to ensure timely access to high quality services for our students. This will consequently improve retention, outcomes and achievement for those students.