The starting point for this documentary was a previous project at the beginning of 2021 that explored five year trends in student mental health services at Bournemouth University. For that feature I also submitted Freedom of Information requests and interviewed representatives (the Chief Operating Officer of BU) as well as students from the university in order to build a picture behind the headline figures.
​
I was really keen to expand that line on enquiry and see if there were any trends and themes that extended throughout universities across the country or if Bournemouth University was an anomaly in the group.
​
Between June and August I set about contacting the universities - as listed on the Government's website as having degree-awarding powers - and requested data from each of the past five academic years relating to number of students accessing university-funded mental health services (broadly categorised as wellbeing and counselling), annual budget / actual expenditure on 'student mental health services', and average wait time from referral to first appointment.
​
Subsequently I received a real drip-feed of data with some universities responding within a week and others taking over four months to reply - despite being legally obliged to provide a response within 20 working days. I also found universities had a vast disparity in the level of clarity they were willing to provide with some being quite reluctant to share the information whilst others went out of their way to provide as much detail as possible: often more so than I had requested.
​
The cut-off point for data to be received was November 23rd (which, depending on the university contacted, was between eight and sixteen weeks after the data had been requested). Every time I received data from a university it was input into one of five spreadsheets to make it easier to crunch the final numbers and spot the outliers - both good and bad.
​
Given the number of interviews I was conducting for the project, and the sheer distance I would have to travel in order to get to every university, a large number of interviews were conducted via Zoom. The aim was to strike a balance in voices between students (both those with positive and negative experiences of engaging in support) as well as academics, Director(s) of Wellbeing, and members of senior leadership within universities.
​
With only seven minutes allocated for this initial piece of audio, I was keen to try and highlight some core themes that ran throughout our interviews and could then be expanded upon within the articles on this website. In order to do that I focussed on two students and two universities - different universities as those of the students interviewed by and large declined to participate in the project - to achieve a balance and prompt questions that the feature pieces, hopefully, answer.