Our Mission
LEARN is Lived Experience for Action Right Now.
We are a community of bereaved families seeking meaning from our loss by taking action to prevent future deaths.
Why does The LEARN Network exist?
• Suicide is the biggest cause of death in people under the age of 35;
• You are, on average, 3 times more likely to die by suicide than in a car accident;
• Bereaved families feel alone in their quest for getting change;
• As a community we are not learning from the past.
We understand that mistakes are made. We want to make our communities safer by making changes to prevent future deaths. The first community we are aiming to make safer is Higher Education.
We have extensive lived experience, we are well-connected and highly motivated to help. Please join us in our quest to improve Student Safety in British Universities.
"Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean."
Ryunosuke Satoro
Duty of Care, Human Rights And The Equality Act
Duty of Care is at the heart of the cultural change that we need to see in the community in order to proactively prevent suicide. Our members are petitioning for clear definition in Parliament and are engaged in legal proceedings against an HE sector institution.
Information Sharing
We are encouraging better information sharing within the institution and with families and friends when staff have serious concerns about a student. We have worked with the ICO to encourage staff to share information sharing to save lives. We have campaigned extensively through the press and also worked with Universities UK on Information Sharing guidance released in late 2022.
Early Alert & Intervention
We were involved in the OfS Challenge competition to create step-change in student mental health. We advocate a ‘Whole Student’ view looking at academic and non-academic factors to identify students at risk. The results of a 3 year project at Northumbria University, examining the potential for technology to identify students in crisis, are due to be disseminated to the HE sector in 2023.
Serious Incident Review
We are following-up on a Prevention of Future Deaths notice (2019) to implement Serious Incident Reviews in an HE setting. This has had the backing of Professor Louis Appleby and is being followed-up by OHID and the Student Mental Health Champion. Working with HE leaders we also contributed the SAFER framework to a ‘Postvention’ update to the Suicide Safer Universities Guide which was published and launched in January 2023.