On 23 February 2023, the Office for Students (‘OfS’) opened a consultation on a new approach to regulating harassment and sexual misconduct which closed on 4 May 2023. This consultation proposes imposing a new ongoing condition of registration (to be known as condition E6) on higher education providers, and to place substantive enforceable requirements on those providers “to achieve the consistent level of protection for all students that self-regulation has not delivered.”
This follows the OfS’s publication of a Statement of Expectations in April 2021, which set out seven informal, unenforceable expectations for how higher education providers should prevent and respond to incidents of harassment and sexual misconduct in their institutions. The expectations are:
The OfS does not consider that progress following this statement is sufficient, opening the consultation with an executive summary which states that “in 2020, full-time students were more likely to have experienced sexual assault in the past year than any other occupational group [according to the Office for National Statistics 2021]. The Equality and Human Rights Commission’s 2019 inquiry into racial harassment found that 24% of ethnic minority students had experienced racial harassment on campus and … the Community Security Trust found that there had been 95 antisemitic incidents reported in the higher education community in 2020-21, the highest number reported for any year.”
The proposed new approach would impose the following new requirements on higher education providers:
It is proposed that definitions of harassment and sexual misconduct should be the same as the meanings set out in the Equality Act 2010, the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 and the Sexual Offences Act 2003.
Institutions will be expected to be compliant with condition E6 within three months of its adoption, and it is therefore advisable that policies are reviewed early to be brought in line with any new requirements. Please do get in touch with our Education team if you would like to discuss how the new conditions may impact your institution, or if there are any points that you are keen to review or develop in light of these proposals.
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