Student Minds and the UPP Foundation are pleased to announce the release of their newest report, Climate Change and Student Mental Health. This report is the latest in a series of our projects supported by the UPP Foundation as part of their ongoing commitment to student mental health and wellbeing. 

Uniting two of the most pressing challenges facing the higher education sector, the report explores questions of curriculum design, leadership, behaviour changes, the impact on specific student groups, the role of government and higher education institutions (HEIs), and more. The findings are based on a self-selected survey of students, and semi-structured student focus groups. 

Selected findings include:

• 71% of student respondents were quite or very concerned about climate change, while 68% were quite or very concerned about the impact on them personally.
• 90% of students said climate change impacted their mental health and wellbeing in the preceding four weeks. The most commonly reported impacts were:
• Frustration and anger due to climate change denial (40%)
• Frustration and anger that not enough is being done to address climate change (37%)
• Anxiety about the impact of climate change on future generations (37%)
• The majority (53%) of students wanted to learn about sustainability in their curriculum, while only 20% already had. Of that 20%, the majority reported experiencing negative thoughts, feelings and behaviours afterward.
• 20% of students reported “often or always” having positive conversations about climate change in the preceding four weeks, while 15% often or always helped somebody else limit their contributions to climate change.
• Students widely expressed a desire to make a positive contribution to tackling climate change but often felt like they didn’t know where to start. 
• Students expressed significant concerns about the impacts of climate change, climate change inaction, and interventions to address climate change, on specific student groups, including international students, disabled students, commuter students, and students from a lower socio-economic background.
• Students in our focus groups demonstrated a holistic, interdisciplinary mindset towards tackling climate change, seeking to embed sustainability in their studies and career regardless of field, and exploring how that, in turn, could affect their mental wellbeing.
• Students believe their universities and the government should focus on energy and recycling over measures to tax or ban meat on campus. For example:
• 79% believe the UK government should invest in renewable energy sources to address climate change, with protecting green spaces (72%) and tackling river and sea pollution (72%) also scoring highly. But only 18% agree with taxing meat products and fewer still (14%) agree with taxing other animal products. 
  • 78% believe universities should create recycling hubs on campus and 76% say they should generate renewable energy but only 12% say they should stop serving meat on university locations. 

In recent years, increasing attention has been given to the relationship between climate change and mental health in the general population and in young people. Despite this, there is a limited body of evidence exploring this connection for students in UK higher education. More needs to be done.

Richard Brabner, Director of the UPP Foundation, said: "This fascinating report illustrates the need for universities to offer students practical and constructive ways for them to tackle climate change and wider environmental issues - not only for the good of the planet - but for their own wellbeing too." 

“While a lot more research is required looking at the relationship between climate change and mental health, we hope the report sparks an important debate in the sector” 

Rosie Tressler OBE, Chief Executive Officer at Student Minds, said: “Our vision is that this report is among the first in a growing body of research, establishing how climate change impacts students mentally and emotionally. We identified this knowledge gap in 2022 and were thrilled that the UPP Foundation backed this work. The report is testimony to our shared strategic ambition to understand how global issues affect students. While there is much more to be done, we hope the report has highlighted areas for further inquiry, as well as providing policymakers and universities alike with a starting point to understand and address this connection on a grander scale.”

The report will be launched during a webinar hosted by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) which will take place online on 18th October 2023, from 10:30am-11:30am. Find out more on their website.

ENDS

Editor’s Notes
Student Minds
Student Minds is the UK’s student mental health charity. We empower students to build their own mental health toolkit to support themselves and their peers through university life and beyond. We challenge  the higher education sector, health sector, and government to make student mental health a priority.  
Contact: press@studentminds.org.uk
Website: https://www.studentminds.org.uk/ 

The UPP Foundation 
The UPP Foundation was created in 2016 by University Partnerships Programme (UPP), the leading provider of on campus student accommodation infrastructure and support services in the UK.  The UPP Foundation is a registered charity which helps students, graduates and universities fulfil their potential to transform lives and communities through funding pilot projects and hosting a thought leadership platform.
Website: https://upp-foundation.org/ 

Our methodology in brief
This research was conducted through a mixed-methods approach, comprising a literature review, a quantitative survey and semi-structured focus group interviews. Eligibility criteria were that participants were current students enrolled at a UK higher education institution, studying within any academic field at any level of study. We had 153 complete survey responses (taking place in February-March 2023) and twelve focus group participants (taking place in December 2022). Participation was incentivised with entry to a draw for shopping vouchers for survey participants and guaranteed voucher rewards for focus group participants.

Are you affected by the issues raised in this piece?
Student Space, run by Student Minds, is here to help you as you navigate the uncertainty of university life  with expert support and wellbeing advice. Whether you’re stressed about your studies, personal life, or if you have concerns about what university life will look like, you don’t have to struggle on your own. Explore their dedicated resources, tips, tools and student stories to find the help you need.

Today is an exciting day - the day we launch our new 10-year strategy, vision and mission. Working with you, we’ve brought together our supporters, students and higher education professionals to put our new bold strategy in place and we can’t wait to work together to achieve it. 

Over the past year we've been developing our new messaging and presenting our new vision and 10-year strategy to you. We recognised that after 10 years our messaging had become inconsistent and we have been working hard to articulate our ambition in a clearer way for you.

We have a clear vision: No student should be held back by their mental health. Our mission is to improve university communities so that every student gets the mental health support they need to reach their goals. 
Academic pressure, money worries, loneliness. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed at university. Around one in four students report having a diagnosed mental health issue while at university. Navigating identity, discrimination and global concerns can all make student life even tougher.

We want every student to have the mental health support they need to reach their goals. We know this is a bold ambition, and that’s why we’ve put a bold strategy in place to achieve it.

At Student Minds, we commit to:

• Continue driving positive change for students - we’ll keep working with students, the higher education sector, health sector and government to make student mental health a priority, and we’ll continue empowering students to look after their own mental health. 
• Ensuring that positive change lasts - we’ll focus on preventative, sustainable, long-term changes that will benefit future generations as well as the students of today. 

We’ll do this by focusing on:

1. Amplifying students' voices - we’ll continue to inspire students to share their stories and share our own insights and research, all with the aim of amplifying voices to policy makers and proposing solutions and challenges to the barriers students face.
2. Facilitating learning and improvement - we want to create the space for conversations and learning, developing toolkits and supporting campaigns around student wellbeing to move us towards an inclusive and sustainable approach to mental health.

You can read more about our ten-year strategy to improve university communities, how we are going to do it and the change that we want to see on our website here.

You can also sign up for our newsletter or follow us on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook and TikTok for regular updates on how we are working towards our bold ambitions. 

We’ve already made great strides in improving university communities over the past 10 years and we’re immensely proud of our team and achievements to date. But there’s more to do and we’re energised to do it. 

Thank you for your ongoing support, we hope you’ll support us on this journey. And if you can, please do consider donating or asking your organisation to support us, to help us get there together. 

Together we can ensure no student is held back by their mental health.

At Student Minds, we are delighted to celebrate the second wave of institutions who put themselves forward for the University Mental Health Charter Award assessments. Pursuing the Award is a statement of a university's commitment to improvement and development of better practice in university mental health. 

In Autumn 2019, we published the University Mental Health Charter (UMHC) after a year of development alongside thousands of students and members of staff across the country. With a focus on a whole university approach, the Charter sets out a number of principles of good practice to help universities to prioritise the mental health and wellbeing of their communities. 

Then in 2020, we launched the University Mental Health Charter Programme, a place for university members to come together, share good practice and receive guidance in applying for  the Award. Institutions are able to apply for the Award assessment process at any stage while a member of the programme. To date the majority of universities on the programme are still to start their assessment process. With over 60 Universities commiting to creating cultural change in this year’s programme, we are excited that a number of these universities have been through the Award process and we are able to announce the first group of universities to achieve Award status. 

Applications for the Award are assessed by a team of peer assessors with expertise and extensive experience of working and studying in the sector. Each Assessment Team contains qualified clinicians, higher education academics, professionals, and students. The UMHC award assessment is a robust process of evaluation aimed at:

• Assessing the university’s progress against the Principles of Good Practice
• Understanding areas of strength and development to inform ongoing improvement to the university and across the sector
• Recognising those universities that demonstrate excellent approaches to student and staff mental health 

Following the assessment, every university is provided with a detailed report highlighting good and excellent practice and recommending further actions each university can take to continue to improve their whole university approach.

Gaining a Charter Award is a recognition of the journey universities have travelled so far, in developing their approach to mental health and wellbeing.

We are pleased to announce that the following universities have received the Award this time round: 

• The University of Sheffield 
• Leeds Beckett University

 
Explore the University Mental Health Charter website to see which other universities have achieved the Award.

These awards are a demonstration of genuine commitment, hard work and investment on the part of these universities and the staff and students who have worked together to reach this milestone. They can be rightly proud of their achievements to date.

It is important to note that achieving an Award is a symbol of progress, it does not mean that those receiving an Award are perfect, or that every student or member of staff will have good experiences within that institution yet. Those receiving their Award today, are doing so because they have made an ongoing commitment to continual improvement and have been able to demonstrate significant and genuine progress towards a whole university approach, in line with the Charter Framework. To maintain their Awards or to achieve a higher level award, all of these institutions will have to continue to build on this progress. There is work still to be done.

There is also still work to be done across the sector. There are two higher levels of Award (merit and distinction), which no university has yet achieved. We look forward to the day when we announce the first universities to gain these levels of award.

Congratulations to these institutions. We are proud of everything they have achieved and the hard work they will do to create change and improve the mental health and wellbeing of their student and staff communities. 

Thank you to everyone who made the assessment process possible. The Charter Programme is gradually ensuring we are all speaking the same shared language on mental health as a sector and building a shared vision for the future. 

Want to join the University Mental Health Charter Programme? Find out more on our website.

We are delighted to announce that we have received a grant of £8,000 from the Charlie Watkins Foundation to support the ongoing development of Student Space. 

Student Space, originally launched in August 2020, was developed to support students through the Coronavirus pandemic. Thanks to a further three years of funding from the Office for Students and Higher Education Funding Council for Wales, we have been able to continue the site and adapt it to support students through the uncertainty of university life with written advice and information, direct support and student stories. 

The Charlie Watkins Foundation was founded in memory of Charlie who was only 22 when he took his life in March 2017. Sadly, Charlie never recovered from the tragic loss of his mother when he was only nine years old. Charlie is one of many young people who have suffered from mental health challenges, and the Charlie Watkins Foundation, which is managed by Essex Community Foundation, aims to raise funds for partners of the Foundation to better support young people who struggle with their mental health and well-being

Tim Watkins, founder of the Charlie Watkins Foundation said: “The Charlie Watkins Foundation is delighted to be supporting Student Minds in this initiative. The development of the Student Space University directory will provide vital support for students whilst continuing our work in "SMASHING THE SIGMA” surrounding mental health issues suffered by many young people today.”

Developed in collaboration with students, service providers and higher education professionals, Student Space currently comprises several support elements including advice and information, student stories and direct support services. The funding provided by Charlie Watkins Foundation will be used towards further developing our university support search tool, allowing us to expand the service even further to include more institutions from across the UK, in particular institutions in Northern Ireland and Scotland,. 

Rosie Tressler, CEO at Student Minds said: “Through Student Space we have reached over 440,000 people to date, providing support for students in need. We welcome the support from the Charlie Watkins Foundation, alongside our other funding partners, to help us continue to ensure that no student is held back by their mental health. It’s clear that despite the end of the pandemic, students are continuing to struggle, with current worries around money, loneliness and exam stress. Together we can ensure that Student Space continues to make support for students even more accessible to those in need”

To date over 75,000 students have accessed our search tool, so we are excited to be able to offer support to even more students who need it. Want to know what support is available at your university? Use our Student Space search tool to find out now. 

We will be updating the directory over the next few months so if your university’s information is not currently available, please direct them to studentspace@studentminds.org.uk and we can support them in adding the information required. 

Do you need or know of someone in need of support? Student Space is here to help you through the challenges of university life. 

On Monday, a statutory duty of care for students at university was debated in the House of Commons, a culmination of tremendous efforts by campaigners through months of work and dedication. We fully celebrate the achievement of getting student mental health on the national agenda and are all indebted to the families and friends who have been campaigning and sharing their experiences to drive positive change.

Members of Parliament spoke to the personal experiences of their constituents, families with experiences of bereavement and students that had difficult experiences at university. These devastating accounts demonstrated the urgent need for accountable processes and clarity on the role of institutions in preventing student deaths by suicide.

Robert Halfon, the Minister for Skills, Apprenticeships & Higher Education, spoke to the governments’ planned approach:

• Through the Department for Education, the Minister committed to the following:
  • Continue funding vital services
  • Ensure the sector is implementing best practice
  • Clarify the roles responsibilities for providers & protection for students
• Ensuring that the sector engages with the support frameworks and guidance that has been developed across the sector. The Minister has written to ask all unis to sign up to the Charter Programme by Sept 2024.
• Professor Edward Peck, the governments’ Student Support Champion, has been tasked to convene an Implementation Taskforce that will be asked to produce a final report by May 2024 that will support institutions to improve across the following areas:
  • Early identification for students at risk, utilising data analytics.
  • Establishing a University Student Commitment with more compassionate academic processes to support students facing assignments or course dismissal.
  • Share existing reviews of previous cases to ensure everyone can learn from these tragic events.
  • Ensure best practice is fully implemented, with targets to be set for improvement by the sector.
• The Department for Education will continue to monitor how effectively the existing law is being applied. If the sector is slow or unwilling to engage with the action plan set-out, then the Minister may ask that the Office for Students explores a regulatory condition for student mental health.

As an organisation, we are committed to an approach that drives forward change across the sector addressing both the root causes of poor mental health within university communities and how this needs to be addressed on an ongoing basis as it evolves over time. This is why we developed the  University Mental Health Charter.

Following the debate, the Rt. Hon. ​Robert Halfon​ MP, Minister for Skills, Apprenticeships and Higher Education, has written to leaders across the higher education sector to express his ambition that all eligible universities join the University Mental Health Charter Programme by September 2024. We hope that this will help to formalise a genuine commitment from all universities across the sector to embed a whole-university approach to student mental health.

To date, 61 institutions have signed-up to become members of the programme and we know that many more universities are committed to make the changes needed to embed mental health and wellbeing into university communities that will improve student mental health. We want to support universities to understand what a whole-university approach to student mental health means for them in practice, give them opportunities to learn from each other and foster safe spaces for open, reflective discussions and learning. 

With recruitment opening soon for 23/24 we are cautiously optimistic about what this might mean for the next year’s Programme membership and look forward to meeting with universities that may consider joining for the first time. We also look forward to working with the Department for Education and the Minister to explore how the government can support this ambition and respond to the wider factors surfaced in the parliamentary debate which contribute to the wellbeing of the university community.

Preventing deaths by suicide is a nuanced, complex, issue, as is addressing poor student mental health more widely. There isn’t a simple solution. We believe that what will prevent further student deaths by suicide is the material changes made to students’ experiences, accountability measures, support, and the way universities and the wider health system aid students in distress. We understand that some may see a duty of care as a way to direct universities to make these changes, but we are not confident this would play out in practice.

At Student Minds, we are an independent charity led by student experience, strong evidence and clinical oversight. We ensure that any work we support or develop is evidence-led and shaped by the expertise of students, HE professionals and clinicians. We are not afraid to challenge the government, universities or other organisations where necessary and often have in the past.

When the petition was first developed we consulted the LEARN network, students, staff, clinicians and legal experts. While supportive of some of the asks of the campaign - for greater clarity on the roles and responsibilities of universities and for the gap in accountability to be addressed - we were not  convinced that a full Statutory Duty of Care was the right approach at this time having not received evidence that the unintended consequences and potential to cause inadvertent harm would be managed. 

Earlier this year we published a news piece outlining the approach we take with the Charter and the recognition we have that this needs to be a joined-up effort across the Higher Education sector, working with the NHS, working with national policy makers and campaigners, and by building on research and evidence to strengthen and improve practice. We also attended the Petitions Committee’s evidence session to speak to the approach we’re taking with the University Mental Health Charter and the guidance, frameworks and best practice that has been being developed over the last few years. 

Student Minds will follow the progress the sector makes, and with our support, over the next 12 months. We will continue to engage with providers and the government to review our position on regulation as required. Thank you to all our supporters, advisors and collaborators for working with us to secure a future where no student is held back by their mental health.

We understand that it's not easy for any students, family members or members of the university community to read about these very difficult issues and we encourage anyone affected to look after themselves and reach out to others if required (please see links provided below).

Are you looking for support?
Research into student mental health suggests that broad support networks can help recovery from, and management of, mental health difficulties. Your wider support network might include friends and family, your GP, University counselling / wellbeing services. 

• For more information on support available to students
• For suggestions on promoting your own wellbeing
  
• For support available at your university

​
​Are you feeling actively suicidal?
If you are feeling like you want to die, please consider that many people who have attempted or come close to suicide look back with gratitude that they did not act on their intentions. If you are feeling actively suicidal now:

• Make a deal with yourself that you will not act just yet.
• Tell someone else how you are feeling or find someone to be with you.
• If that is not possible right now, phone: Samaritans: 116 123, NHS non-emergency: 111, or HOPEline UK: 0800 068 41 41 / text: 0776 209 697 (Opening hours are 10am-10pm weekdays, 2pm-10pm weekends, and 2pm-10pm Bank Holidays.)