You asked
I would like the following information:
The number of students who committed suicide since 2017 broken down by year.
Please include the age of each student when they died (if possible).
I have accessed the adhoc report published by the Higher Education Standards Agency via your website. This covers a ten year period up to and including 2017.
We said
Thank you for your enquiry.
We only hold mortality data based on the information collected at death registration, namely: age, sex, area of usual residence and cause of death. The Estimating suicide among higher education students, England and Wales publication contained experimental statistics that were produced in collaboration with the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA). Analysis was based on mortality records linked to HESA student records. This was a one-off collaboration and at present there are no plans to update the report. Therefore, we do not hold all of the necessary information in order to provide an update for this analysis.
However, should we decide to update this report in the future, the publication date would be announced via our Release Calendar.
Please also see the following suicide analysis, which may be of interest:
We publish number of suicides for England and Wales for 1981 to 2019 in our annual suicides publication, available via the following link: Suicides in England and Wales: 2019 registrations.
We also produce provisional suicide data for England on a quarterly basis, with the most recent update including deaths that were registered from January to September of 2020. This is for deaths registered in 2020 and, due to registration delays, most of these deaths would have occurred in 2019. The next update of this release is due on 30 April 2021.
Please note when viewing our mortality data by suicides, registration delays for deaths caused by suicide tend to be 5 to 6 months on average. Suspected suicide deaths require an inquest, where a coroner investigates the circumstances around the death. The amount of time it takes to hold an inquest causes a delay between the date of death and the date of death registration, referred to as a registration delay. More information about the impact of registration delays.