Student Grief Network: ‘we’re about reconnecting with life’

When Anna May, founder of the Student Grief Network (SGN), first arrived at the University of Leeds, she assumed that her bereavement was behind her. 

However, as her undergraduate studies progressed, it became apparent that old wounds following the death of her brother, Benny, when she was 10, had “resurfaced”, and “became something I couldn’t really ignore”.

May has since founded the network, which helps students through grief by offering support and creative workshops, as well as working with institutions to offer training, guidance and toolkits on how to improve bereavement support for both students and staff.

Approximately 10 per cent of students will have suffered the loss of a family member or friend by the time they finish university, according to the SGN, equivalent to approximately 280,000 students in any given year, affecting their mental health and ability to study, and putting them at higher risk of dropping out.

May said that although many academics and universities have “good intentions” around supporting students, the lack of a formal framework results in inconsistency. 

“When I was at university, I started looking for support and I spoke to a few tutors who were lovely...but there was a bit of awkwardness around the subject. Some people clearly just didn’t want to talk about it at all. Some people were great and invited me in for a cup of tea, but didn’t really know what to say or where I could go for support,” she said. Some recommended she contact UK-wide bereavement charities, but these felt too generic and not relevant enough to the student experience.

Away from home for the first time and in need of community, May initially conceived of a theatre project centred on grief to raise awareness. But when she discovered Leeds’ Bereaved Student Network, which was in its early days and struggling to grow, she “joined forces” with the group and started running creative workshops and discussion groups. After putting up posters in the students’ union and promoting events on Facebook, 12 people attended the first workshop, and May said “the impact was honestly amazing”, with one person telling her the sessions “stopped them dropping out of university”.

Then, just as she was building up the network, May suffered another blow: the death of her father, Neil, during her final year.

Experiencing loss and grief while at university can pose unique challenges, said May, noting that losing her dad meant she had to grapple with navigating assessment extensions and deciding whether to take time out of university. More widely, students and young people are often the first in their friendship groups to experience loss, and normalised unhealthy lifestyle habits – including excessive alcohol use and poor attendance – can “mask” when people are really struggling, she said.

“There’s a lot of expectation at universities to have the best time of your life and for it to be a carefree experience where you can figure things out. But actually, the heaviness of grief and the responsibility and weight that comes with that often is really contradictory to those expectations,” she noted.

But her father’s death “motivated” her to formalise the support network, and showed her that it was “something really needed”. Set up initially as a social enterprise following her graduation with the help of start-up funding, it has since been bought by the education group Kaplan International, and she now works full-time hosting talks and arts events about grief, running workshops and raising awareness with universities and students. 

Last month the SGN launched a framework for universities on how to support students through grief, which calls on universities to establish protocols for bereavement, and a more “consistent” response across the sector. It offers advice on policy and training and encourages universities to provide easily accessible materials on their websites.

“Staff are just really worried about getting it wrong, so they kind of avoid it – they feel like they don’t want to make the situation worse,” May said.

“But this isn’t about making you an expert; you can refer people to other places. It’s just giving you those basic tools to just have human conversations, and knowing there is no right or wrong thing to say.”

May said she did have concerns that the financial challenges universities currently face could constrain support available but “a lot of what I put in the framework doesn’t involve financial investment, so it’s an issue but there are ways around that”.

Ultimately, any work around grief should be about “empowering people to be able to make steps in their own journey”.

She said: “There’s a perception when I tell people that I work in this area that they’re like, ‘Oh my God! Your work must be so depressing, or, isn’t that really hard?’

“And yes, grief is a really difficult topic but the reason we’re trying to address it is not to make people sadder or bring more people into grief but it’s actually to help lighten the load. The only way through grief is by looking at it in the eye and dealing with it, if you feel ready to. So, although it’s about grief, I think about my work as being something that enables people to reconnect with life and all those good things as well.”