A university welfare officer warns that privatisation is weakening the support for students, whilst fees narrow the student group
“I am directly involved with coordinating the welfare and discipline for the students at a Russell Group university – both those in university accommodation, and to a lesser extent students living in the community. On the discipline side, we handle everything from smoking in non-smoking areas to anti-social behaviour: we can hand out community work within the university, fine them, or even ask them to leave. And our welfare work involves supporting students with depression, those who are self-harming, people who’ve been assaulted – all the problems that people encounter when they leave home for the first time, and find themselves living amongst strangers.
We work closely with the local health trust’s ‘early intervention in psychosis’ team, and they’re very good; but if we end up sending people to A&E they’re often sent straight back to us, even when the student wants to stay in hospital. Some of the hospital doctors seem to think that university students must be living with supportive friends, but people can become very isolated: we’ve had to write reminding the doctors that they’re not returning people to a family environment.
In fact, for students living off-campus it can be quite a poor environment. Most of the private landlords just want to get their rent, and won’t intervene if there’s noise complaints or other problems. I’ve never seen one evict a group of students – but I have seen one extend a property in order to house eight students next door to an old man. I don’t see how that helps the community.
The best solution is for the city to approve the construction of more dedicated student housing, and we’re going in the right direction there. That may create another problem, however: if the students move into purpose-built accommodation, we could end up with a big stock of empty HMOs [houses in multiple occupation] which aren’t really suitable for families. The risk is that they end up as bedsits, which could create worse social issues than those caused by ‘studentification’.
Another benefit of purpose-built accommodation is that students are closer to our welfare services, many of which are provided by volunteer students: we train these student wardens in mediation and conflict resolution, so they can handle the minor issues that can easily escalate – “Who stole my cheese!?” We know that if students make it through their first year, they’ve a good chance of completing their degree; and the key to intervention in that first year is having students listening out for the kind of things that university staff would never get to hear about, and going in to have a chat with people.
These welfare services are under threat, though, because the university is selling off some residences and privatising their management. Private companies won’t want to spend a lot of time handling cases of anti-social behaviour, and they’ll be reluctant to keep a few bedrooms empty to provide emergency housing for students who – for example – have been attacked or have mental health issues. It is possible to run systems like this in private accommodation, but most providers rely on the university to step in; and this may sound cynical, but some providers seem to show off their welfare services until they win a contract and then let them fade away. University accommodation is a learning space and a key element of academia, but that’s weakened if there’s disjointed communication between the management of a building and those handling welfare information.
What’s more, I think that university-run halls are important in attracting students: people coming to open days meet our student wardens, and realise that we look after people who choose this university. That’s going to become more important now that fees are so high.
It seems to me that fees are also reducing the number of ‘non-traditional’ students going to university. We used to have quite a diverse intake, with lots of black British students; people from London; people whose parents hadn’t been to university. But that seems to have slowly dried up, and I’m sure the decline has been caused by the steady rise in tuition fees.
I’d like to see families means-tested and tuition fees cut for poorer students, or part-time courses funded for people in work. Whatever we do, though, we have to do something – or we won’t just have fewer people coming to university; we’ll also find that our student group is once again mostly made up of the middle-class, Anglo-Saxon children of the shires.”