Risk 7: Insufficient personal support

• Students who do not receive sufficient personal support on course, including (but not limited to) mentoring, advice, counselling and access to extracurricular activities may be more likely to report lower wellbeing and/or sense of belonging, experience poor mental health, achieve lower-than-expected on-course attainment and lower continuation rates. These may be experienced for all students, but may be experienced more acutely by students with certain characteristics.
• Differential access to personal support relating to careers progression and/or less time to participate in enrichment activities may lead to differential outcomes in terms of progression into further study and employment.

Students who are:

• prisoner
• from a low household income
• first in family
• disabled
• students reporting a mental health condition
• mature
• black
• Asian
• mixed ethnicity
• other ethnicity
• from a Gypsy, Traveller or Roma ethnic groups, or the Boater and Showmen communities
• commuters
• young carers
• from a socio-economic background of 'never worked' or 'long term unemployed'
• from a socio-economic background of 'small employers and own account workers'
• from a socio-economic background of 'routine occupations' or 'semi-routine occupations'
• estranged
• care experienced
• children in need
• parents
• LGBT
• Christian
• spiritual
• Muslim
• Buddhist
• Hindu
• Jewish
• Sikh.

Note that the ordering does not denote a scale or ranking system.

For different groups of students, the impact of these risks that are visible in data might be:

• low scores for NSS questions relating to mental health and wellbeing 
• increasing and/or high proportions of students accessing provider-run wellbeing and counselling services
• increasing and/or high proportions of students accessing hardship funds
• low on-course attainment rates
• low continuation rates
• differential outcomes in terms of progression to further study
• differential outcomes in terms of progression to the labour market.

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