Today is the 23 February 2024 – one year since the Office for Students (OfS) launched its consultation on ‘a new approach to regulating harassment and sexual misconduct in English higher education’.
The consultation closed on 4 May 2023 and the OfS was aiming to publish a summary of responses and their decision ‘later in 2023’. The timeline for the response is now and has been for a while ‘in the coming months’.
This delay is leaving universities in limbo – particularly when it comes to policies on staff-student relationships. In my previous role at the University of Bath, we discussed waiting for the outcome of this work as far back as 2022. While a small but increasing number of higher education providers have chosen to ban staff-student relationships, many are waiting on the outcome of the consultation to take their next steps.
The OfS outlines two options for managing staff-student relationships in the consultation document.
