EMBRACE HE, is a project specially designed to help address problems of mental health and lack of wellbeing in students in higher education. The mental health and wellbeing of youth in Europe is a high concern and this group includes students, who similar to other young people, often suffer anxiety, depression, attempted suicide and serious mental health problems. If not addressed, many of these problems can continue onto later life, in employment, family life and society and can also negatively effect day to day activities of study, progression and achievement in study, participation in social life and activities, networking and developing interpersonal skills. EMBRACE HE mobilises partners from across Europe to focus upon this ongoing problem for all HE settings, to create tools to help staff better address mental health and wellbeing issues in student populations. The EMBRACE HE consortium team is comprise of: Birmingham City University, UK; Universidad de Navarra, Spain; Panepistimio Kristi, Greece; Vilinius University, Lithuania and educational NGO, the Western Balkans Institute from Serbia. These partners represent a strong geographical reach and engagement in networks across Europe and also are from countries that experience different types of mental health and wellbeing issues with HE student populations. EMBRACE HE brings together models of innovative best practice and embedded curricular, extra-curricular, pedagogical, pastoral and collaborative activities (with Students’ Unions, external stakeholder etc.), to address student mental illness and wellbeing, with a unique open access toolkit training model. The aim for EMBRACE HE is to enhance innovation in HE response to student mental wellbeing by enabling learning, implementation of projects and practice to address mental wellbeing issues in HE and with this, to increase the evidence base with the highest quality information and materials to allow HEIs to make informed choices about methods to respond to student wellbeing issues. Finally EMBRACE HE aims to help educators and associated professionals in HEs, as our key target group, to enhance student wellbeing, to tackle lower grades, drop out and poor life chances post-graduation, higher rates of suicide and para-suicide, substance misuse, self-harm, use of health services for mental health issues or hospitalisation and social exclusion/lack of participation in HE and society. The target groups of EMBRACE HE, are all teaching, learning, support, administrative, managerial/executive and information staff working in HEI's, HE policy makers & student representative organisations. The beneficiary group will be students across Europe, in every type of HEI context, studying from foundation level to doctoral studies. EMBRACE HE will: - design and create a programme of activities that will bring together best practices in an easily implemented format to support HEI's in supporting student mental wellbeing. - provide training, tools and resources for academics and academic-related staff in HE, who support students, - create policy resources for HE wide implementation and action planning, structured activities at the institutional, systems and class room levels, to support good student wellbeing, - share and disseminate the above and have impact in Europe and beyond, in enhancing the capacity of HE to support student wellbeing needs. EMBRACE HE has been developed to bring together, through an innovative open learning toolkit approach, the good, exciting and effective practice that is already visible but poorly consolidated across Europe. It then provides the knowledge & skills for HEIs to implement innovations in their organisations. The partners will each lead a work package or programme of activities to develop toolkits on specific issues of contemporary importance for student mental health and wellbeing. This methodology will also allow each partner to input information into each work package too, to bring together innovation and best practice from a wide range of sources. The results of the project will be a positive enhancement of practice in working with student mental health and wellbeing in 25% of higher education providers in Europe, with 30,000 downloads of the toolkits and other resources from the website, multiplication events & webinars will lead to over 50,000 participants using EMBRACE HE resources over the project lifetime. The project will have high impact because it's free and open resources and networking opportunities on the EMBRACE HE website will facilitate and encourage more innovative responses to mental health and wellbeing across the HE sector and support further future positive change. The longer term benefits will be that HE will become more responsive with increased student mental health and wellbeing initiatives and that other projects can build on this foundation, leading to high standards of mental health and support for students across the EU and beyond.
The consortium team recognised that mental health and wellbeing of students in tertiary education was an urgent problem and staff teams needed support in understanding and working with the issues. We developed our project to focus upon the following horizontal (HP) and sectoral priorities (SP): 1. Supporting Educators (HP) 2. Social inclusion (HP) 3. HE: Building inclusive higher education systems (SP) 4: HE: Consolidating and improving evidence-building on higher education SP) The objectives of the project were: - creation of a programme of learning resources, activities and a platform to bring together HEI best practices in supporting mental health and wellbeing, - providing training, tools and resources for academics and academic-related staff in HE, who support students, - offering toolkits and resources to support HEIs and diverse groups of staff in understanding and addressing student mental health and wider wellbeing issues, for use at different levels of HEIs, - share and disseminate the above, influencing HE capacity and supporting student wellbeing needs. This project's aims and objectives were grounded in the aspiration to make HEI settings and practice more inclusive and better at improving student mental wellbeing.
The Consortium applied for funding for this project because we identified that there was a major problem in HE relating to supporting student mental health and wellbeing. EMBRACE HE, was created to address the issues HEIs face in supporting students who are experiencing unprecedented challenges in a highly pressured study and employment landscape, which demands high academic, transferable and transversal skills. It aimed to examine this issue through creating open access knowledge and learning resources (toolkits) and offering other activities that would will bring together best practices in an easily implemented format to support HEI's in supporting student mental wellbeing and through opportunities for dialogue. The needs we have addressed are the lack of HEI broad staff understanding of student mental health and wellbeing, lack of easily useable resources to build an understanding of, to reflect on and then implement actions to better support students, along with lack of dialogue and opportunities to network and discuss the issues. The main target groups of EMBRACE HE who have these needs, are HEI institutions, all HE teaching and learning and support staff, HE policy makers & student representative organisations.