At last, students in England must be protected from staff abusing power

After the multiple delays it has faced, it is a pleasant surprise that the Office for Students’ new regulatory requirement for addressing harassment and sexual misconduct in English higher education is as strong as it is on the central issue of staff-student intimate relationships.

Options on the table ranged from requiring universities to keep a “register” of such relationships to prohibiting them outright. The former – the sector’s preferred option – was widely expected to be implemented, but the OfS has instead gone for a bolder move that stops just short of a ban.

Universities, it says, must take “one or more steps which could make a significant and credible difference in protecting students from any actual or potential conflict of interest and/or abuse of power”. Such a step could include a ban on intimate personal relationships between relevant staff and students, but institutions may instead propose other protections.

This is a much better approach than the register, which would probably be administered by human resources staff untrained in recognising abusive relationships. In other words, it would have tied up staff resources in useless window-dressing.

By contrast, the step the OfS has taken provides quite a clever way of giving universities some autonomy while strongly steering them towards a ban. Talk of protecting students from abuses of power is a significant shift away from wording around “conflicts of interest” that has previously held sway in the sector, a framing that presents both parties as equals and ignores the ways differences in institutional status, disciplinary prestige, expertise, age and gender create clear risks of abusive relationships.

However, 62 per cent of responses to the consultation argued against a ban on staff-student relationships. It is disturbing to see such resistance to clearer professional boundaries when evidence shows that students themselves want them. But the OfS would have had difficulty defending the register when its own data – published alongside the regulatory requirements – shows a massive problem with coercive staff-student relationships.

A survey of students across 12 universities found that 1 per cent had had an “intimate relationship” with a staff member, while a separate representative panel survey of 3,017 students from across the sector found that 10 per cent had had one in the last year. Half of those relationships were with staff who were involved in their education or assessment or who had a pastoral/professional responsibility towards them, and a third of students in such relationships had felt pressure to begin, continue or take the relationship further than they wanted because they were worried that refusing would negatively impact them, their studies or their career. Even consensual relationships led to problems when they broke up.

On top of this, one in six respondents from the panel survey had had a staff member attempt to pressure them into an intimate relationship in the past year. These findings are shocking. While measuring prevalence of sexual misconduct is notoriously difficult methodologically, even if we take the more conservative 1 per cent figure, this suggests that at least 28,000 students have recently had intimate relationships with staff, approximately 10,000 of which were not fully consensual. This shows what research between The 1752 Group and the National Union of Students revealed back in 2018: that abuses of power are an ongoing problem within UK higher education.

The OfS research also backs up our finding that the majority of students are uncomfortable with staff having intimate relationships with students: 81 per cent of respondents felt this way, rising to 89 per cent of women. This is why the 1752 Group has been campaigning to get the University and College Union to support prohibiting such relationships. Several local UCU branches have passed motions and the proposal is under discussion to become national policy.

Of course, prohibiting such relationships won’t stop them from occurring. And while existing OfS regulations require institutions to have “fair and credible” processes for formal handling of such reports, our research shows that many are a long way away from this in practice. What a ban would do, however, is help students who have been targeted for “grooming” and “boundary-blurring” behaviours to recognise that this is unacceptable and to seek support.

The new regulation doesn’t come into effect until August 2025, so universities have a year to get their houses in order. Let’s hope that they use this time to train up their staff (especially HR) and write good-quality policies in consultation with students – especially the postgraduate researchers who are most likely to be targeted for such relationships. And implementing the other requirements in the regulatory guidance, such as training for all staff and students, could help create a safer climate for students to speak up.

In the wider guidance, however, there remain major omissions: staff who are victimised are not covered, it only applies to England, it omits domestic abuse and it fails to discuss the role of gender norms as a cause of sexual misconduct. Nor will the OfS’ monitoring and evaluation mechanisms help the many students and staff who have experienced poor outcomes to complain to their university. And there will also be major challenges for institutions in implementing this agenda, not least due to the current funding crisis.

Nevertheless, the regulation provides a tool for students and staff to push within their HEIs for safer and more equal work and study environments. It comes not a moment too soon.

Anna Bull is senior lecturer in education and social justice at the University of York and director of research at The 1752 Group, which campaigns to end sexual misconduct in higher education.