Our work on suicide prevention

Suicide prevention is a national public health issue and every death by suicide is a tragedy. We do not directly regulate providers specifically on suicide prevention and we don't have a role in investigating individual cases of suspected or confirmed suicide among higher education students.

However, we will look at issues that might relate to suicide when we more broadly consider a provider's compliance with our conditions of registration and will take proportionate regulatory action where appropriate. 

We work with other government bodies on national-level suicide prevention policies and programmes to embed the specific needs of the student population. The national suicide prevention strategy, implemented locally, identifies universities and colleges as important partners.

Suicide prevention should be part of a whole-institution approach to supporting mental health for all students. To support providers, we have:

• shared effective practice, including our topic briefing on suicide prevention
• part funded guidance to help university leaders prevent suicides, published in September 2018 by Universities UK (UUK) and Papyrus
• funded UUK's publication 'Responding to a suicide: advice for universities'
• Funded the mental health Challenge Competition and funding competition to help providers develop practical and innovative approaches to improve student mental health
• facilitated closer collaboration between higher education and healthcare providers to develop innovative models of joined up care to support students via a series of action learning sets