Ïã¸ÛÁùºÏ²Ê¾«×¼×ÊÁÏ

The joint submission, titled University and College Counselling Services in Scotland: One-On-One Counselling Amid the Student Mental Health Crisis, aimed to provide a better understanding of the challenges facing Scottish university and college counselling services in providing effective and accessible one-on-one counselling.

The trio founded their student-led research group, Phronesis Research, in 2022, as a response to the uncertain funding situation for university and college counselling services in Scotland.

Fabienne is a 1+3 Doctoral Fellow in Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Cambridge. She also works with ScotSMART, the leading student mental health research network across Scotland. Annabella is currently applying for PhDs in Clinical Psychology and works alongside Fabienne with ScotSMART and Musa is about to start his PhD in Criminology at the University of Cambridge.

All three have lived experiences of mental health difficulties and using university counselling services in Scotland.

Fabienne said: "Our motivation to pursue this research stems from our own experiences of using counselling services at Scottish universities, Annabella and I both graduated from the University of Edinburgh and Musa graduated from Edinburgh Napier University.

"Although the Scottish Government had pledged to support more than 80 additional counsellors between 2019 and 2023, they didn’t commit to funding for the academic year 2023/24 and beyond."

Annabella added: "We recognised the need for a robust evidence-base to persuade policymakers to allocate additional funding and were concerned about the lack of research on university and college counselling services in the UK in general.

"There is limited inclusion of student perspectives within the current literature and we sought to address these within our research."

The study is one of the first student-led studies on student mental health in Scotland and analysed Freedom of Information requests for quantitative data on counselling services to all 27 registered colleges and 19 universities in Scotland.

Musa said: "We particularly wanted to examine trends and patterns in student demand and waiting times, the availability of provision and external referral pathways, the relationship between demographic characteristics and utilisation and the problems presenting at services.

"The research identified three key challenges facing university and college counselling services. Firstly, that the demand for services has rapidly increased over the past decade, leading to longer waiting times. Secondly, that male and first year students are underrepresented in counselling which may be a sign of barriers to accessing counselling support.

"And finally, even though most university and college counselling services aren’t designed to provide long-term support, few institutions have set up external referral pathways into community mental health teams."

The research suggested that in order to ensure equitable access for effective counselling support for all students, these three challenges must be addressed.

Upon completion of their research, the group prepared two reports and presented them to policymakers in the Scottish Government.

Fabienne said: "We were delighted that the First Minister Higher and Further Education, Graeme Day, confirmed that the Scottish Government had considered their research and would be investing an addition £3.21 million into university and college counselling services.

"However, we recognise that the work doesn’t stop here, we’d be very interested in expanding our research across the UK and conduct UK-wide evaluations for university and college counselling services.

"We’d like to conduct mixed-methods research with undergraduate and postgraduate students to examine and understand their experiences of utilising higher and further education counselling services and we’re really keen to understand what barriers students experience when trying to access services, particularly students from marginalised and underrepresented backgrounds."

Upon finding out that they’d been selected as the winner of the Ïã¸ÛÁùºÏ²Ê¾«×¼×ÊÁÏ New Researcher award for 2024, Annabella said they were "completely surprised and delighted."

She added: "We completed our research without any funding and we hope that our research can serve as a positive example to other researchers of what’s possible, even with limited resources.

"Longer term, we hope that this recognition will help us to continue our work and achieve our mission – to ensure that every student in the UK can receive counselling when they need it."

In addition, the trio thanked Dr Bonnie Auyeung and Dr Aja Murray for their support and 'igniting their passion for conducting student mental health research' and Rick Hughes, Ïã¸ÛÁùºÏ²Ê¾«×¼×ÊÁÏ’s University and College Counselling journal Editor, for providing a platform to share their research findings.  

Finally, they wished to thank all counsellors for the incredible work they do in supporting student mental health across the UK.