Two eminent south-coast universities, two visit days. At the first we are lectured by the dean of the faculty who is dull, pompous and self-serving but knows that he must mention pastoral care. There is a counselling centre a couple of hundred yards away, he notes.

Two weeks later, at the second establishment 60 miles away, the unassuming head of history explains that each student will have a personal tutor, who will be someone they know through their academic work. Thus the tutor will be well-placed to support them. Does this work, I ask a student. It has done for him, he replies. Then a tutor explains that, although he is a personal tutor to 20 students, in practice only half of them need him in that capacity. A few weeks earlier a student told him that she was having an abortion. He talked to her throughout this difficult time; a lot of it was just listening.

This happened a couple of winters ago when I was in loco parentis to a young friend who needed to narrow down his university choices. It wasn’t that I thought he’d need pastoral care, but I wanted it to be there in case he did. It seemed to matter. Universities think so, too, though for a different reason. John O’Leary, editor of The Times Good University Guide, has noticed that many now have new buildings to house student services. Invariably these include a counselling facility – because, he believes, of the commercial imperative that comes from students having become paying customers.

“Since top-up fees came in, universities have started to talk about students as customers or clients,” he says. “A lot of universities think that they’re going to have to improve their facilities because students who pay will be more demanding. They wouldn’t be investing in new buildings for student services, which includes pastoral care, unless they thought it was important in terms of student recruitment.”

Nicola Barden, head of counselling at Portsmouth University and chair of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy, has worked in the field since 1991. “In trying to think about student retention and what makes them have a good experience, we know that people sometimes need help as they leave the joint cocoon of home and school,” she says. “It’s part of a natural progression in taking responsibility but it’s a very sudden transition.”

There is another school of thought on this: that modern parents are often overprotective and that, far from demanding hand-holding for our precious darlings when they go to university, we should be encouraging them to be independent.

When I suggest to Nicola Barden that students might sometimes be needy, she says that she can tell I’m not a fellow professional. “I haven’t had that sort of feeling.” I tell her about my experience of undergraduate visit days. Personal tutors can be a good first line of pastoral care, she says, but what works best is when there’s good communication between academic and support departments. “I’m always greatly cheered when a student is able to say, ‘I’ve talked this over with my personal tutor’. Then the standard is held by the whole institution. If the problem goes beyond the tutor’s competence it’s absolutely right to refer the matter. Students will often talk to who’s there, whether it’s someone in their department or in hall. We just need to make sure that everyone knows that everyone is connected.”

The key to student contentment, she believes, lies in students forming good peer-group relationships in the first semester, a process that welcoming halls of residence and kind tutors can facilitate – provided, that is, that staff in halls of residence and tutors know who to refer to when a problem needs expert help. The subtext here is clear: the counselling profession is sniffy about the ability of anyone who isn’t a counsellor to undertake pastoral care. Janet Aldridge, chairwoman of the Association for University and College Counselling, puts it explicitly: “Some institutions feel that personal tutors are out of their depth and that isn’t their main function. I think they need some training so they can differentiate between personal problems that they can deal with and those that are too time-consuming and difficult.”

As our interviews with students show, some personal tutors would agree that they have neither the time nor the inclination to offer support to undergraduates. Others offer immeasurable help to contain and resolve problems. Just as it’s obvious that the quality of care varies wildly from department to department, and from university to university, it’s clear that however much universities boast about their student services, pastoral care is only as good as the person doing it, whether that is the hall cleaner, a friendly tutor or a trained counsellor.

You can understand that counsellors want to protect their patch, particularly when they are part of a growth industry. But I can’t help feeling that what most parents would want for their children is a culture of support – a much bigger ask than a professional counselling service.

My young friend went to the friendly university department and has metamorphosed from a shy teenager into a happy, sociable young man. This is his achievement and he has not sought pastoral support, though I suspect that he has received a little bit. Which is just as it should be.

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