Our research topics

A better understanding of student mental health can help the higher education sector design services to support students. It is important to know how many people are struggling, who is struggling and what sort of help they need.

The share of undergraduate students at universities across the UK who said they had experienced mental health difficulties rose from 6% to 16%, meaning around one in six reported such challenges. The analysis, by The Policy Institute at King’s College London and TASO, found a significant part of this increase occurred in the final academic year analysed; a period during which the cost of living crisis intensified. The analysis also shows that experiences of mental health among undergraduates are deeply unequal, with some groups much more affected than others.

We aim to fill in the knowledge gaps around student mental health so that culturally appropriate and sensitive services can be designed.

Find out about our work in student mental health

Disabled students represent a significant proportion of the higher education population. In 2023, the number of accepted UK applicants who had disclosed a disability increased by approximately 34% from the previous year.

While disabled students may have already developed an extensive set of organisation, self-management and resilience skills, they may have more difficult study trajectories, experience less satisfaction with their experience, and worse education and employment outcomes in comparison to other students.

Effective support to enable disability inclusion is therefore more vital than ever.

Find out about our work to support disabled students

Among the inequalities in higher education in the UK, the degree awarding gap between students from marginalised ethnic backgrounds and their white peers is one of the most persistent and longstanding. Addressing it has become an increasingly important aim for the higher education sector, and the Office for Students has a key performance measure to address it.

Over the last decade, interventions across the sector have sought to tackle inequalities with respect to race or ethnicity. However, the persistence of the degree awarding gap has revealed a myriad of complexities and challenges for higher education providers, and so the pace of change has been slow.

Find out about our work to address the ethnicity degree awarding gap

There are disparities in labour market outcomes for different groups of young people, as the data analysis in this project demonstrates. These gaps are generally greatest for employed graduates who are female, from families of low socioeconomic status or certain ethnic groups.

Education providers can and do offer programmes and interventions to try to reduce these disparities. We aimed to provide evidence of the equality gaps and for which interventions are being used, how they are being evaluated and which are most effective.

Access our work in employment and employability gaps