Two words in the new HEA framework are doing all the work

On Tuesday the Higher Education Authority launched a revised version of the National Student Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Framework, now called Folláine le Chéile — Wellbeing Together. The Irish Times reported it on 13 October. It builds on the original 2020 framework, collapses nine themes into three — leading, learning, nurturing — and shifts the weight from responding to crises towards promotion and prevention.

Senior leadership is asked to own the wellbeing agenda, including strategy, funding and culture. Student services, from counselling through to libraries and sport, are given a wellbeing remit. Colleges are asked to build data systems to check whether any of it works. It covers distance, part-time and on-campus students.

Ross Woods, senior manager for mental health and wellbeing at the HEA, said students "see wellbeing as a foundation rather than an add-on to student success".

All of that is sensible. But the line I have read four times now is in the section on academic staff, who are asked to promote supportive environments, direct students to services — and to design accessible curricula.

Why those two words matter more than the rest

Put a curriculum design obligation inside a mental health framework and you have said something quite radical, possibly without meaning to.

For as long as I have worked in this system, student wellbeing has been treated as a service: a thing that happens downstream, in a room with a different door, to students whom the course has already strained. The course itself stays as it is. The student is what gets adjusted.

That is exactly the move Universal Design for Learning refuses to make about learning. UDL starts from the position that variation among learners is the normal condition, not an exception to plan around afterwards, and that if your material only works for a narrow band of people then the material is the thing that needs redesigning. "Accessible curricula" is that same argument, applied to wellbeing.

Because a great deal of what we call student distress is not a mental health event. It is a design failure with a human cost. A deadline that moved without notice. A module where the assessment brief exists only in something somebody said aloud in week two. Reading lists released the night before. Three essays landing in the same week because nobody mapped them. A lecture that is the only route to the content, delivered once, at nine o'clock, in a room you have to ask about.

None of that is a diagnosis. All of it is survivable if you have reserves and a quick way of finding out what is going on. For an autistic student, or a student with a long commute, or a carer, or a first-in-family student who does not yet know that asking is allowed, those are the conditions that turn a hard course into an impossible one.

The gap in the reporting

The coverage does not mention disability, neurodivergence or universal design once. It says the framework recognises the needs of all types of students but names only distance and part-time learners.

I notice that, and I am not going to make it into an accusation. A document can do good work without using my vocabulary. But it does determine what happens next, because a phrase nobody defines is a phrase nobody is accountable for.

So here is the test I would set, and I would set it at module level rather than at strategy level. Can a student point to "accessible curricula" in an actual module descriptor? Is there a line that says: here is the learning outcome, here are two equivalent ways of demonstrating it, here is when every deadline in this module falls, here is where the material lives and how long before the class it appears?

If the answer is yes, the framework has changed something. If the answer is that the college has appointed a working group and added a wellbeing paragraph to its strategy, then we have moved the language and left the architecture alone.

What I would do with this if I were advising a college

I would stop treating this as a student services document and give it to whoever chairs programme review. The three themes — leading, learning, nurturing — put learning in the middle for a reason. The HEA has handed academic departments a mandate they did not ask for and may not have noticed, and mandates like that have a short shelf life before somebody quietly reassigns them to a service.

And for families: if you are watching an autistic school leaver weigh up third level this winter, the number of counsellors a college employs has never really been the question. The question is whether the course is navigable — whether deadlines are predictable, whether material arrives in more than one format, and whether asking for an adjustment marks you out as a problem. A framework that names the curriculum is a better lever for asking that than one that only names the service.

Two words. They are the best thing in the document. Whether they survive contact with a timetable is the part we will not know for a year.

Inclusion by presence is not inclusion. Change the environment, not the child.

Elaine Walsh is the founder of Autism & Me (autismandme.ie), a Waterford-based neuroinclusive education consultancy. She writes here on Universal Design, inclusion and Irish education, from the twin vantage points of the classroom and the kitchen table.

Source: Niamh Towey, "Mental health of students must be prioritised across campus under new framework", The Irish Times, 13 October 2026. https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/education/2026/10/13/mental-health-of-students-must-be-prioritised-across-campus-under-new-framework/