I’ve had enough of the tragedy. Earlier in my career, students I knew were lost through violence. Knives, guns, silly misunderstandings or random unfortunate encounters.
Having been through that, I never ever want to shake another mother’s hand following the murder of her son, trying feebly to express my sympathy in the face of an all-consuming and unfathomable loss that can never be eased or really lived with.
And neither do I ever again want to see parents, siblings or friends broken by the aching, chasm-cracking grief that follows the self-directed violence of yet another student suicide.
I’m not sure those outside education know what is going on amongst our much-maligned Gen-Z population. An Association of Colleges report last year revealed that 75 per cent of FE colleges had five or more students who attempted suicide over the previous 12 months, while 30 per cent reported 10-14 such attempts. Many had more.
Maybe this news has come to most people only as a rumble, distant and quickly passing on the horizon of their awareness. It might even sound hyperbolic or far-fetched.
But it seems that suicide is at pandemic levels for this generation. Over the course of my career, I’ve known more students die by their own hand than from cancer, accidents or any other single cause.
A recent Department of Education review placed greater responsibility on universities to consider the safety of student accommodation from a suicide-prevention point of view. Rightly so.
I’ve seen bright young people who were bursting with life leave our care at college only to then get lost in the wider world of HE, some of them never to return home again.
HE must do what it can to prevent this. Nobody disputes that. But the responsibility placed on HE institutions has forced me to consider our position in FE too.
There’s one area in particular which should stop us in our tracks. You should try walking around your college with the eye of a young person struggling with suicidal ideation. It’s an act that demands some empathy.
What do you see from such an awful angle? Easily-accessed workshops filled with blades? Toilets in which someone could lock themselves away and forever disappear from view?
Maybe, and perhaps most shockingly of all, you start to see the far more fundamental and structural dangers. Many of our college architects of recent years seem to have fallen in love with walkways and balconies.
They provide wide vistas and a sense of scale that might well befit an institution of learning which seeks to open up horizons. They look great, those airy atriums surrounded by floors and floors of learning spaces suggesting scale and ambition.
But now imagine you’re a young person who is finding everything too much. What the dizzying drops now suggest starts to look very different.
I don’t know what to do with the fear this realisation has chilled me with. I don’t know how to retro-fit a college to ensure it is suicide-proof. Maybe that isn’t even possible.
You could employ the kind of netting you see in prisons, which would of course change the whole dynamic and feel of a place, but is that really any kind of solution? You could raise balustrades to make them harder to breach. I just do not know.
I’ll care for the young people in my charge as pastorally as a subject teacher possibly can. I’ll watch for when they’re moving towards the edge. I’ll flag to them the phenomenal services and counselling our colleges try to provide. I’ll do whatever I must to help them navigate this tricky time of life in these pressurised days.
But I cannot help worrying that we’re walking in a dream every time we go blithely through another day without a preventable disaster happening somewhere on our FE estate.
I never want to meet another stunned mum or see another heartbroken dad. So maybe we in FE need to be raising our voices just a little bit more, shouting and screaming to shock wider society into awareness. Before another voice is all too suddenly stilled.
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