University duty of care to at-risk student

Short answer

There is currently no general common law duty of care in England and Wales requiring a university to take reasonable steps to prevent a student’s suicide or serious self-harm simply because the university knows the student is at risk. The courts have so far declined to establish such a freestanding duty. However, universities do owe important legally enforceable duties in this situation under other routes, most significantly the Equality Act 2010 where the student is disabled (which includes many mental health conditions), and potentially under statutory health and safety and safeguarding obligations, and under the Human Rights Act in specific circumstances. The most authoritative recent guidance comes from the litigation brought by the family of Natasha Abrahart against the University of Bristol.

The negligence position and the Abrahart litigation

Natasha Abrahart was a Bristol physics student with severe social anxiety who took her own life in 2018, on the day she was due to give an assessed oral presentation. Her family sued the university.

In the County Court in May 2022, the judge found that there is “no statute or precedent” establishing that a university owes its students a general common law duty of care in negligence to take reasonable steps to avoid causing injury, including psychiatric injury. On that basis the negligence claim failed. This means that, as the law currently stands, you cannot assume that a university owes the kind of general duty of care that, for example, an employer owes an employee or a school owes a young pupil.

Crucially, though, the family still won. The judge held that the university had breached its duties under the Equality Act 2010 and that this breach contributed to Natasha’s death. The University appealed, and in February 2024 the High Court upheld the finding against the university. The appeal judge specifically declined to rule on whether universities owe a general duty of care in negligence, describing the issue as “one of potentially wide application and significance” that should be left for another case. So the negligence question remains formally undecided at the higher court level, but no positive general duty has been established.

The Equality Act 2010 route

This is where the real legal teeth currently lie, and it is the route on which the Abrahart family succeeded. A student who is at risk of suicide or serious self-harm will very often meet the definition of disability under section 6 of the Equality Act 2010, because many mental health conditions, such as severe depression or an anxiety disorder, count as a disability if they have a substantial and long-term adverse effect on the ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities.

Where a student is disabled, a university (as a provider of higher education under Part 6 of the Act) owes duties including:

1. The duty to make reasonable adjustments. This is an anticipatory and ongoing duty. It requires the university to take reasonable steps to avoid a disabled student being placed at a substantial disadvantage by its provisions, criteria, practices, and by physical features and the way things are done. In Abrahart, the university’s continued insistence that Natasha undertake oral assessments in the standard way, and marking her down for not participating, when it knew she could not do so for mental health reasons, was found to be a failure to make reasonable adjustments.

2. The prohibition on discrimination arising from disability under section 15, meaning unfavourable treatment because of something arising in consequence of a disability, unless justified.

The Parliamentary and EHRC guidance confirms that the reasonable adjustments duty is anticipatory in nature, and that the duty in an individual case can be triggered once a student’s disability is evident to at least one member of staff, including student-facing staff such as tutors and lecturers. That is a significant point: the knowledge of a tutor or lecturer can fix the institution with the obligation to act, even without a formal disability disclosure to a central service.

Other relevant duties

Health and safety law. Universities must comply with statutory obligations under health and safety legislation, which can be relevant to student welfare, though these do not create a general private-law duty to prevent self-harm.

Human Rights Act 1998 and Article 2. In narrow circumstances, a public authority can owe an operational duty to take reasonable steps to protect an identified individual from a real and immediate risk to life of which it knew or ought to have known. This “Osman” type duty has been developed mainly in custodial and detention settings and in relation to health authorities. It has not been clearly extended to universities in relation to students, and its application here is uncertain, but it may be argued in an inquest or claim context where a university is treated as a public authority.

Contract. The relationship between student and university is contractual. A university may owe contractual obligations to provide services with reasonable care and skill, and to follow its own published policies on wellbeing, mental health and support. Failure to follow its own procedures can found a contractual complaint.

Safeguarding and internal policies. Universities publish mental health, wellbeing and safeguarding policies. While these are not general law, they can be enforceable through the contract and through the complaints and Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA) route, and a serious departure from them is evidentially important.

What “knows a student is at risk” actually requires

It is worth being careful about the phrase “knows a student is at risk”. The legal consequences differ sharply depending on what the university actually knew and when. Relevant questions include what was disclosed, to whom, in what terms, whether staff recorded and escalated concerns, whether a disability was evident, whether reasonable adjustments were requested or obviously needed, and whether the university followed its own policies. A vague or historic concern is very different from a clear, current, communicated risk. The stronger the actual knowledge held by the institution, and the clearer the disadvantage the student faced, the stronger any Equality Act claim becomes.

It is also important not to assume that a bad outcome automatically means legal fault. A university may have acted reasonably, offered support that was declined, or been unaware of the true severity of the risk. The legal analysis turns on what was known and what steps were reasonable at the time, not on hindsight.

Possible future change in the law

There has been a sustained public and parliamentary campaign, supported by bereaved families, for a statutory duty of care to be imposed on universities towards their students, and a large petition prompted a government response and debate. As matters stand, the Government has not created a new statutory duty of care, taking the view that existing legal duties already apply and that a broad new duty would be difficult to define across all aspects of university life. This remains a live policy area, so the position could change, and any current advice should be checked against the latest position.

Practical options if this concerns a real situation

If you are dealing with a specific case, the sensible order of steps is usually:

1. Gather and preserve evidence. Emails, messages, meeting notes, records of disclosures, medical evidence, the university’s policies at the relevant time, and any records showing what staff knew and when.

2. Use the university’s internal complaints procedure first. This is normally a precondition to going further and is where you set out the facts and the alleged failures, particularly any failure to make reasonable adjustments.

3. If the internal complaint does not resolve matters, escalate to the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education, which reviews unresolved student complaints and can recommend remedies. Note strict time limits usually apply, typically bringing a complaint to the OIA within 12 months of the university’s final decision.

4. Consider Equality Act claims. A disability discrimination claim against a university under Part 6 is generally brought in the County Court, and there is normally a six-month time limit from the act complained of, which the court can extend where just and equitable. This is the route with the clearest legal foundation given Abrahart.

5. Inquest. Where a death has occurred, the coroner’s inquest is a separate and important process. It can examine the circumstances, and where Article 2 is engaged it can consider by what means and in what circumstances the person died. Families can seek to be interested persons and to obtain disclosure.

6. Only then consider civil litigation more broadly, weighing cost, delay, stress, the current uncertainty around any negligence duty, and the strength of the Equality Act and contractual routes.

Key points to take away

There is no established general common law duty of care to prevent student suicide or self-harm, and the appeal courts have deliberately left that question open. The genuinely enforceable and now court-tested route is the Equality Act 2010, especially the anticipatory duty to make reasonable adjustments for disabled students, which can be triggered by the knowledge of an individual member of staff. Contractual obligations, adherence to the university’s own policies, health and safety duties, and in limited cases human rights duties, may also be relevant. Because so much turns on precisely what the university knew, when, and what steps it took, the specific facts, dates and documents will determine the strength of any claim.