When Your Child Wants to Leave the Course

The tip

If your child rings to say they want to leave their course, ask what has happened, then what they want instead, and don’t settle anything that week.

Student Minds, the student mental health charity, tells parents that ups and downs at university are normal, and that for most students, doubts about the course or the university pass with a little time. For some, the course or the place is wrong, and leaving is the right decision.

Before anything is decided, your child needs to talk to the university, which may be able to offer a break from the course, usually called suspending their studies. UCAS’s advice is to speak to the university first, and as soon as possible.

Leaving or suspending changes student finance. A student who leaves or suspends has to stop their student finance and repay anything they’re no longer entitled to, and how much depends on when in the year they leave and whether they plan to go back. UCAS says full student finance continues for sixty days for a suspension on health grounds, and any Tuition Fee Loan already paid is your child’s to repay.

If low mood is part of it, the university’s wellbeing service and your child’s GP are the first doors, and you can tell either of them what you’ve seen. The tip “The Year Out Conversation” is about what can come next.

If your child tells you they have hurt themselves, or talks about not wanting to be alive, act that day: help them ask their own surgery for an urgent appointment, or use the crisis line for the nation they are in, not the one you are calling from. England, Scotland and Wales: call 111 and choose the mental-health option. Northern Ireland: call Lifeline on 0808 808 8000. Help is free, confidential and available at any hour. Whoever answers may share information to arrange care or keep someone safe.

If your child is badly hurt, or may have taken too much of a medicine, get medical help straight away, even if they seem well. Call 999. Or go to your nearest A&E. Help is free and available at any hour.

• Ask what has happened and what they want instead, and decide nothing that week.
• Ask your child to talk to the university first, about a break as well as leaving.
• Check what leaving or suspending would mean for their student finance before they decide.

It goes with

• When They Leave Home. For parents whose child is about to leave home, or has just gone, for university, an apprenticeship, a job or a year away.

The first chapter you open here is free to read in full.