About Us
Where it all began, our mission and ambition for the future.
Who we are
Start to success is a 2-year project which aims to develop a whole community approach to support the mental health and wellbeing of students, led by Keele and Staffordshire University. The region’s universities, colleges, local authorities, police and NHS providers have come together with a common purpose to remove barriers, improve support and services, and enable student success.
The project will work across all aspects of the student journey to support effective transitions into, through and out of higher education, with three areas of focus; student transitions, early intervention and step change in support through partnership working with the NHS.
A number of Project Officers have been recruited to support the delivery of the project who will each focus on a specific strand of work including working with the NHS on referral pathways, lifestyle coaching, postgraduate support, foundation year support, peer support, active wellbeing, transitions from FE to HE and progression and success.
In 2019, the Office for Students launched the Challenge Competition to find innovative ways to combat a sharp rise in student mental health issues and spark a step-change in student support across the country. Bids were considered from 48 lead institutions with 10 collaborative projects successfully awarded funding covering over 67 project partners. The OfS awarded £6 million, with co-funding of £8.5 million, amounting to a total of £14.5 million investment across projects. The Start to Success Project was one of the ten successful projects funded by the OfS Challenge Fund Competition. Find out more about the other successful projects here.
Our Ambition
There have been many recent changes and challenges in relation to student mental health, including political and social change, changes in mental health in the wider population, changes in the student cohorts and changes in the nature and complexity of student mental health. Nationally, the media are describing a student mental health crisis, with 78% of university students reporting mental ill health in the last year (NUS, 2019) and an increased demand for student counselling services (IPPR, 2017). There any many reasons we might be seeing an increase in demand for mental health support. These include a greater acceptance in talking about mental health in society, better and earlier diagnosis of treatments, universities are becoming more efficient at supporting students and an increase in academic and financial pressures (Pollard, 2015). We also know the at transition into university from college or sixth form is a difficult time, especially for those with mental ill health. Existing support networks, including NHS provision can be disrupted, and universities rely on students declaring a mental heath issue before arriving in order to put in place the appropriate support. However, for various reasons we know this isn’t happening, including stigma.
Our project aims to develop and champion an integrated ‘whole community’ approach to mental health and wellbeing for students studying in higher and further education in North Staffordshire. The region faces fundamental socio-economic challenges which limit access to higher education. We aim to demonstrate an increased intake to HE for students, particularly those from a widening participation background and those with pre-existing mental health issues. We want to see a reduction in ‘transitional anxiety’, an increased sector wide understanding of student needs and an improvement in academic outcomes. The project will aim to achieve early access to support services as well as increasing the health, wellbeing and resilience of students and graduates. Furthermore, as a result of the project, we would like to see improved partnership working, both internally and externally to the university including NHS services.
Our Partners
