September.8.2022

The kids aren’t all right. Neither are staff.

By Sally Kift

Good morning on R U OK? Day 2022. Today’s the perfect day to ask our higher education (HE) students how they are doing. According to the latest national 2021 Student Experience Survey (SES) released late last month, the answer is a depressing ’not so good’. The 2021 data again show that the top ranked reason for the 19% of undergraduate students in Australia who consider early departure from their course is ‘health or stress’. For those students who consider leaving, 50% say this is why. The next highest ranked reasons, also consistently reported over the last several years (2015-2021), are all risk factors that can combine to further exacerbate students’ health or stress: study/life balance; workload difficulties; need to do paid work; financial difficulties; expectations not met; and personal reasons. Students lead complex and complicated lives! 

While some might say that considering leaving is not the same as actual leaving, this somewhat misses the point. It is enough and concerning that so many students feel overwhelmed in this way and that their learning engagement and student experience are so obviously impacted as a consequence. These findings also confirm what we have known for many years. Tertiary students are a ‘very high-risk population for psychological distress and mental disorders’ compared to the general population. Pre-pandemic, the prevalence and severity of mental wellbeing issues were well-known and increasing across student cohorts. In 2017, Orygen found that more than half of HE students aged 16–25 years reported high or very high levels of psychological distress and were more likely to consider an early exit from their course as a result. The National Tertiary Student Wellbeing Survey (2016), conducted by Headspace for the National Union of Students, similarly found that:

  • 67% of young students (16-25 years) and 59% of mature students (26-50+ years) rated their mental health as ‘fair’ or ‘poor’;
  • 65% of young students and 53% of mature students reported high or very high psychological distress; and
  •  Only 1.6% of young students and 3.4% of mature students reported no impact of study on their mental health in the past year.

Certain cohorts have been identified as particularly at-risk, including equity group students who, given their frequent intersectionality, may experience compounded disadvantage. These cohorts include, for example, students who are: young; Indigenous; international; from rural/remote areas; identify as LGBTQIA+; with disability; from low socio-economic backgrounds; HDRs; and/or studying law and medicine.

And then along came COVID. Already high levels of student distress increased as many students felt overwhelmed, isolated and frustrated in the rapid transition to new ways of learning, working and living. For example, one study found that the percentage of HE and vocational education students reporting extremely high levels of distress during the pandemic (at 23%) was higher than before the pandemic (at 19%); considerably higher than for the general population at 3% pre-COVID and 13% during COVID. University counselling services that were already finding it difficult pre-COVID to meet escalating demands for support and struggling with increasing complexity and severity of presentations had to move completely online.

It’s not just situational and personal factors that affect students’ mental health. There is considerable evidence also that ‘how students are taught and assessed, and how they engage with learning, can have an impact on their wellbeing’. That evidence has been available both pre– and over-COVID, and some excellent resources have been developed in response (for example, Nicole Crawford’s NCSEHE Fellowship and the seminal work of Baik and her colleagues). Recently, a large-scale project in the UK has also focused on how curriculum can support wellbeing and learning, and has developed an Education for Mental Health Toolkit.

Not just student mental wellbeing

Academic and professional staff are also at risk, awareness of which has also been raised both pre– and over-COVID. In the UK, Morrish analysed data obtained under Freedom of Information requests of HE providers in a study that could be usefully replicated in Australia. She found:

  • Evidence of an escalation of poor mental health among university staff in the period 2009 to 2016, based on data obtained from 59 HE providers on referrals to counselling and occupational health services; and 
  • That referral increases of 50% were common over that period, with some universities experiencing much higher rises: in counselling, up to 316% and in occupational health up to 424%.

When updating these data in April 2020, Morrish and Priaulx found that ‘analysis of 17 universities reveals a continued rise in staff access to counselling and occupational health referrals’.

It is also reported that ‘responding to student mental health problems now appears to be an inevitable [though ambiguous] part of the role of an academic’, given their frontline, student-facing responsibilities. This has been found to negatively impact on the wellbeing of academics and requires universities to respond with clarity around role and boundary definition in this regard.  

‘Mental health and wellbeing’ in Australian higher education

Orygen defines ‘mental health and wellbeing’ as encompassing ‘the continuum of mental health states… Mental health includes both the presence and absence of mental ill-health, though it is more commonly associated with the presence of mental illness. Mental wellbeing is generally thought of as positive mental health’.

The Higher Education Standards Framework 2021 (HESF), against which all HE providers are regulated, specifically requires that adequate support for student mental health and wellbeing be provided (HESF Wellbeing and Safety: Standard 2.3.3). Also, the provider’s governing body must ‘develop and maintain an institutional environment in which …the wellbeing of students and staff is fostered’ (HESF Corporate Governance: Standard 6.1.4, emphasis added). The extent of regulatory oversight of these specific matters is unclear, though TEQSA has identified ‘wellbeing and safety of students’ (with no specific inclusion of staff) as one of its ‘compliance priorities for 2022’.  

In 2017, the Higher Education Standards Panel (HESP) recommended that ‘every institution should have an institution-wide mental health strategy and implementation plan’ (Recommendation 8). In 2020, the Productivity Commission’s Mental Health Inquiry Report recommended that the ‘accountability of tertiary education providers should be strengthened with expanded mental health support to their students, including international students’ (Recommendation 6). Like the HESP, the Productivity Commission recommended that all education providers should develop a student mental health and wellbeing strategy as a requirement of registration, urging also that data be collected nationally on support services’ use and that both vocational education and HE regulators monitor and collect evidence of interventions for ongoing improvement.

In 2020, with government funding provided in response to the 2017 HESP Report, Orygen produced the Australian University Mental Health Framework. It is unclear how many HE providers have adopted the Orygen framework as many had already developed their own response between 2017-2020, a number of which focus to a greater extent that Orygen’s on staff wellbeing. In 2022, there still appears to be no collection of national data as recommended by the Productivity Commission. 

What would ‘good’ look like for sector-wide HE mental wellbeing?

In the face of COVID-19’s exacerbation of existing mental health concerns, we need to up our game as a sector on how we support our student and staff wellbeing. It is fortunate that we are able to draw on some excellent international research and resources in this regard. In particular, the UK student mental health charity, Student Minds, led an 18 month, sector-wide consultation process with thousands of students and staff to produce The University Mental Health Charter (2019) which covers both students and staff and directs specific attention to learning, teaching and assessment. 

This work is complemented by Universities UK’s development of a strategic framework launched in 2017 and updated over COVID – Stepchange: mentally healthy universities – for a whole-of-institution, whole-of-sector approach that positions mental health as fundamental to HE’s core mission and foundational to university life for its students and staff. UUK has also developed an open-access self-assessment tool that maps onto the Charter. Completing the UK package of initiatives, The Wellbeing Thesis, hosted by Student Minds, provides resources to support and improve the mental health of postgraduate research students, while the Student Space website, again courtesy of Student Minds, offers an amazing array of tailored support for student cohorts who might face additional challenges with mental health at university. Collectively, this impressive cross-sectoral collaboration and alignment sets the international benchmark for sector-wide best practice. Australia seems some way behind in comparison. Churchill Fellowship scholar Dr Ben Veness has asked whether it is perhaps time for Australian universities to introduce an award or credentialing program for their mental health programs, such as that available in the UK and the US

But wait – there’s more! With the abrupt scaling on online delivery, digital well-being has also become a priority for all students and citizens. Jisc now incorporates ‘digital well-being’ as an element in its digital capability framework, defining it as

the impact of technologies and digital services on people’s mental, physical, social and emotional health. It is a complex concept that can be viewed from a variety of perspectives and across different contexts and situations.

Jisc has produced resources to support the digital well-being of staff and students: one for practitioners, with guidance and good practice principles, and another for senior leaders that articulates key issues and responsibilities and eight good practice principles for organisations. 

Foreseeable harm + regulatory requirement = HE duty of care 

The mental health and wellbeing of our sector’s students and staff have been on the radar (out from Under the Radar) for many years now. We know that harm is foreseeable. We should listen closely when another blip sounds a warning, as it did again last month via the SES data, and ask ourselves – what are we really doing about the intractable and ‘wicked problem’ of student (and staff) mental health and wellbeing?

Professor Sally Kift is a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (PFHEA), a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law (FAAL), and President of the Australian Learning & Teaching Fellows (ALTF). She has held several university leadership positions, including as Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at James Cook University. Sally is a national Teaching Award winner, a national Program Award winner and a national Senior Teaching Fellow on the First Year Experience. In 2010, she was appointed an Australian Discipline Scholar in Law. In 2017, Sally received an Australian University Career Achievement Award for her contribution to Australian higher education. Since 2017, she has been working as an independent higher education consultant. @kiftsally 

Republish this article for free, online or in print, under Creative Commons licence.

11 thoughts on “The kids aren’t all right. Neither are staff.

  1. We can reduce the stress on students by better design of courses and programs. As educators we can also reduce the stress on ourselves through training to design better courses.

    In 2013 I enrolled in a graduate education program to learn how to teach online. On graduating in 2017, I warned my colleagues that they should be ready to teach online, in case a regional crisis kept international students off campus. As a result, when COVID-19 struck in 2000, I was ready to switch to online delivery, without needing to change course content, materials, or assessment. I was then able to help my colleagues, and train tutors. Unfortunately many had not prepared for this foreseen and foreseeable crisis, causing much unnecessary suffering.

    There has been much ill considered comment about how online learning is a poorer experience for students, and more stressful. However, if designed with the limitations of online learning in mind, course and programs can be more flexible, and less stressful for students and staff.

    One simple example of how to reduce stress is with small regular items of assessment. These can be used to keep students who are more distant from you working, and allow you to identify those who need help. To make this less stressful, you can use a “best x of y” assessment scheme, where student can bomb, or miss a few assessments, without penalty. You can also have these assessment only count for a pass, so student don’t need to stress out on each one.

    Another way to reduce stress, I suggest, is to admit university study is an inherently stressful experience. Marketing university as a joyful, relaxed experience, as depicted in many silly TV ads, is not only dishonest, but dangerous. Students compare their stressful reality, to the idealized world in the marketing, and conclude there must be something wrong with them. We need to tell students that uni can be fun occasionally, but most of the time it is hard work, frustration, and occasionally frightening.

  2. Sally Kift says:

    Thanks for this thoughtful comment Tom. There are clearly many ways in which we can work to make learning, teaching and assessment far less stressful for students, a number of which you have identified here.
    As you say, effective online learning is enabled by careful instructional design, planning, organising and sequencing, that leverages the flexibility that student really like to best effect with scaffolding and embedded support. As the seminal/ viral Hodges et al article set out – emergency remote teaching is much different from effective online learning (https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning).
    Your last point I think also goes to the need to manage student expectations on entry far more explicitly and build help-seeking behaviours for when [learning] times get tough.
    In addition to your blog posts, there is this good work from NCSEHE Nicole Crawford, which additional to the link to the link to her Fellowship report I gave above – see Supporting students’ mental wellbeing: what can
    we do “on the ground”? https://www.ncsehe.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/StaffGuide-Student-mental-wellbeing.pdf
    Thanks again and good of you to engage.
    Sally

  3. Susan Ledger says:

    Great article to help raise awareness about wellbeing in Higher Ed and the need for better understanding and preparedness. We have similar issues in our schooling sector. However, Australia has been leading the way in initial teacher education with many universities adopting the BRiTE modules (Building Resilience in ITE – Building Resilience, Relationships, Wellbeing, Taking Initiative, Emotions). This home grown evidence based research is well worth viewing. It is preparing our preservice teachers for the ever changing demands of the profession.
    https://www.brite.edu.au

  4. Sally Kift says:

    Thanks so much Susan and it is quite sad, if unsurprising, that this resonates with the schooling sector.
    What a marvelous resource https://www.brite.edu.au looks to be! Also tapping into the professional motivation for a student to become a well and resilient teaching professional! Congratulations to all involved and it would be interesting to read any further evaluations of the resources from the data you are collecting.
    On a different note, it makes me rue again the enormous loss for the sector of the defunding of the Office for Learning and Teaching, which looks to have funded this research and the resource development.
    And – we really do need to collect all these various resources together, to share and learn from each other about good practice.

  5. Susan says:

    Great point sally – we need to curate all of the OlTC projects – fabulous research and programs. I am not the creator of bRITe, but a proud user!

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