Thirty-eight years ago I left a Russell Group university, where I met my tutor regularly, had seminars four times a week and was known by the teaching staff. As one of a very few students from a comprehensive school background, this made the experience manageable.
Now my son attends the same university and I can concur with the “institutional indifference” identified at Bristol University (Growing concern and anger after student suicides, 26 May). He recently told us he had attended hardly any lectures this year and has not met his personal tutor in a year and a half. This triggered no pastoral measures to indicate he was floundering in a system that gives students no structures, and only corrals them in for end of year exams.
His previous educational experience was in a nurturing east London comprehensive and FE college where he gained three As at A-level.
This contrasts with my experience of the University of East London, which is 115th on the Guardian league table. Their target group is mature and harder-to-reach students, and as such they put pastoral work at the heart of everything they do.
As a teacher, I know the message is filtering down to working-class students that university is not worth £50,000-plus worth of debt on graduation, the distinct possibility of no graduate dividend and the harm to your mental health.
Simon Shaw
Redbridge Teachers Association vice-president
• I read your article on student suicides at Bristol University with concern and thought it worth sharing the very recent experience of my daughter in her final year at another Russell Group university priding itself on its pastoral care. It’s hard to imagine a move more guaranteed to skyrocket student stress than bringing forward the last final-year exam by half of its original timescale, yet this happened in my daughter’s case, from 5 June to 17 May, with three weeks’ notice.
Despite following the available channels to get the original date restored, there was no willingness to consider this, nor any recognition of any impact on the students’ wellbeing and the potential consequences, only a rigid insistence that correct procedure was being followed in line with official policy: “(a) that the dates of individual papers are subject to change and are not guaranteed in any way; (b) that the university will accept no responsibility for any personal arrangements any student may make on the basis of the provisional dates.”
Equivalent to a fireguard manufacturer disclaiming that “not catching fire is not guaranteed in any way, nor any personal impact from combustion”. Hard to imagine a more thoroughly determined hand-washing of a university’s duty of care for its students than this.
So far the students seem to have kept their heads above water, but things could have gone very differently. The university needs to address a potentially fatal disconnect between its wellbeing position and actual ways of working.
Tom Richards
Winsley, Wiltshire
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