Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what estimate his Department has made of the number of suicides by students in (a) further and (b) higher education in the 2017-2018 academic year.

The information requested is not held centrally.

However, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) release ‘Suicides in the UK: 2017 registrations’ is available at the following link: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/suicidesintheunitedkingdom/2017registrations. This provides statistics on the number of registered suicides by five-year age groups for England between 1981 and 2017. Specifically, the figures are shown in table 10 of the accompanying dataset, which is available at the following link: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/suicidesintheunitedkingdomreferencetables.

In 2017, there were 155 recorded suicides for those aged 15 to 19 and 261 registered suicides for those aged 20 to 24. However, the figures are based on the entire population for the associated age groups and they do not indicate whether the suicides were among higher or further education students.

In addition, the ONS release ‘Estimating suicide among higher education students, England and Wales: Experimental Statistics’ is available at the following link: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/estimatingsuicideamonghighereducationstudentsenglandandwalesexperimentalstatistics/2018-06-25.

This provides experimental statistics on suicides among higher education students in England and Wales between the academic years of 2012 to 2013 and 2016 to 2017. In the academic year 2016 to 2017, the figures show that there were 95 suicides among higher education students.