Mother hopes petition will be leaders' lesson after Cambridge Uni son's death
Jared Ndisang died after developing mental health issues
A mother who lost her son after developing health issues while at a Cambridgeshire university hopes a petition will give higher education leaders a “valuable and vital learning opportunity”.
Jared Ndisang began to develop problems with his mental health in his third year at Cambridge University when he was not given the chance to take a break from his studies.
His mother, Jo, said intermission, a break from studying, was unavailable to Jared and was told to graduate from his natural sciences course.
“Each student death is a valuable and vital learning opportunity for higher education leaders and it’s my belief we must insist on this learning,” she said.
“I was phoning Jared morning and night as it came up to his exams and that’s how I picked up on the fact Jared was not in a good place.”
"My son was a competent, young man"
Jo started to see that Jared did not look himself in March 2018, before he died a year later.
An inquest found that Jared's death was caused by "sudden cardiac death of undetermined cause".
“My son had never had mental health issues; he was a competent, young man and the other thing I’d want to achieve from the petition is transparency,” she said.
“I would have been grateful when I dropped Jared at university that there would have been discussion around mental health and university because I would have been on high alert.”
She feels that had he attended a different university, his death may not have happened.
“It might well have been that if he attended a different university, he would have been given permission to intermit, but in our case that didn’t happen,” Jo said.
She has now backed a petition, to be passed over to Downing Street today, calling on universities to be made legally accountable for how students are treated.
The petition has received more than 128,000 signatures.
“We believe that a legal duty of care will provide clarity, parity and accountability,” Jo added.
“We believe that our children’s deaths are preventable and we’re trying to make purposeful and meaningful sense of our children's loss.”
We have approached Cambridge University for comment.