What next for duty of care debate?

Ask a university leader to list their top two or three priorities and student mental health will almost certainly be among them.

That this would, with almost equal certainty, not have been true a decade ago raises a couple of questions: have leaders got better in this regard? And has student mental health got worse?

The answer to the first question depends largely on whether you think universities are taking the issue as seriously as they say they are, and what they are doing about it.

The second is a tricky one: growing concern about mental health is not a university-specific issue, but the finding in a recent study published in The Lancet – that students are more at risk of depression and anxiety than their peers who go straight into work – did provide a concerning counter-narrative to the idea that students’ difficulties simply reflect wider societal trends.

In the discussions about mental health, there are also distinctions to be drawn between students who report low-level issues – which it’s important to say do need to be taken seriously and deserve a response – and those who suffer from acute mental health crises.

Talking recently to an academic with deep expertise in this area, I was reminded of how at risk young people can be, particularly early on in their university days.

The risk of “first-episode” psychosis, they said, was amplified by a combination of age, moving away from family support structures and the potential for experimentation with alcohol and drugs.

Such crises are more likely to result in tragic consequences when universities are unaware of them, particularly if a student is admitted for emergency psychiatric care in a hospital setting, and then discharged without their university being aware, or being unprepared to provide ongoing support.

While this describes a particularly acute scenario, universities also have to build support systems to deal with a wide spectrum of less clear-cut situations, all of which are of enormous significance to the individuals involved, and with at least the potential to escalate.

Sitting in the middle of these fraught issues is a question that has major ramifications for universities: whether or not they have a legal “duty of care” towards their students, with campaigners calling for a new statutory duty of care to clarify the situation – something institutions have strongly resisted.

A tragic case that has become a focal point for debate in the UK after a series of court rulings is that of Natasha Abrahart, a University of Bristol student who suffered from social anxiety and who took her own life on the day she was due to give a presentation to hundreds of fellow students.

The university was found in an initial court judgment to have breached the Equality Act by failing to make adequate adjustments so that the 20-year-old could participate in the course.

However, Bristol appealed, arguing that it was a “core competency of a professional scientist” to be able to “explain laboratory work orally, to defend it and to answer questions on it”.

The judge hearing the appeal disagreed, and earlier this month the university’s appeal failed, but on a secondary point – the case made by Ms Abrahart’s parents that Bristol had a duty of care to their daughter – the appeal judge declined to overturn the earlier ruling that Bristol did not, noting that the issue “is one of potentially wide application and significance”.

Speaking to Times Higher Education this week, Ms Abrahart’s parents said that this wider significance was “the whole point” of seeking a legal ruling on duty of care.

“One of the things we wanted was clarity so that everybody knows where they stand,” Robert Abrahart, a retired lecturer, told us.

“I don’t think it could be any more confusing. Is there a duty of care or is there not a duty of care? And, if so, what is that duty and what is the degree of care owed? Nobody knows: parents don’t know, students don’t know, staff don’t know. All we wanted was clarity and we haven’t got it.”

For the bereaved parents, legislation is the way to “put some parameters” on the question of duty of care, as well as to provide a way to override concerns about competing legal duties such as privacy.

Universities – and, so far, government – have taken a different approach to these acutely difficult questions and the Abraharts are of the view that it will take another legal test case – perhaps one in which the duty of care issue is not enmeshed or obscured by the arguments over the Equality Act as in their daughter’s case – to settle the matter one way or another.

They may have had their day in court, but that will not be the last word on an issue with enormous significance for universities, their responsibilities, and the status of both students and institutions.

john.gill@timeshighereducation.com