A league table on sexual misconduct could be coming

This morning the Office for Students (OfS) has announced the launch of a pilot prevalence survey that will be run in 2025.

All final year (undergraduate) students across England will be invited to take a short online sexual misconduct survey after they have completed the National Student Survey (NSS) after Christmas.

The aim is to learn more about students’ experience at a provider and national level, and follows the results of a survey with a small number of volunteer universities earlier this year. Students will be able to opt-out of the whole survey, or not answer individual questions.

OfS’ Director for Fair Access John Blake says that students have told the regulator that addressing harassment and sexual misconduct is a key priority for them – and that its new regulation in this area will help to ensure they are better protected and supported:

We recognise these are sensitive and upsetting issues, and students will be able to opt-out of the whole survey, or not answer individual questions. But by anonymously sharing their experiences, students will help universities and colleges to better understand the issues affecting them, and to tailor their approach accordingly.

We don’t yet know how OfS intends to use the data beyond the generalities – although it’s worth remembering what CEO Susan Lapworth said to the Women and Equalities Committee’s hearing on the issue this time last year:

If we can collect prevalence data that gives us a picture across the sector as a whole and an understanding of which kinds of students in which contexts are affected by this, and if we can then see that for individual universities, that lets us target our interventions. So a university with high prevalence and low reporting would perhaps raise concerns for us – and we would want to then understand in detail what was going on there and that would allow us to focus our effort.

That raises the question surrounding publication plans. OfS told us that there is a “presumption” that it will publish full data – the spectre of a grim league table will cause many to worry, especially when combined with response rate concerns.

If it was to decide not to, it’s hard to see how the results wouldn’t end up FOI-able – but you might expect that at the very least, findings at provider level would be shared with them and/or their SUs. As of today, “no full decision” has been made on any of that – although Blake told us that it certainly won’t be published alongside NSS results.

There are wider questions. Given the new Condition E6 duty covers racial harassment and misconduct, it’s hard to see why OfS wouldn’t be surveying on that too. Blake said that it’s because sexual misconduct was a “considerable driver” of the new condition of registration – although that argument is pretty circular, given OfS didn’t test a “statement of expectations” or commission research on race and racism in the same way that led to the focus on sexual misconduct.

There will at least be an interest in “how experiences might vary between students with different characteristics”.

Despite increasing divergence over the question set (overall satisfaction gone in England, free speech and mental health services awareness added in England), NSS remains a UK-wide project – and so of interest too is whether devolved nations will be taking part – not least because Medr will soon be consulting on its own regulatory arrangements, and only this week Universities Scotland published a report that didn’t talk about prevalence intel. On that we just know that devolved nations are “interested”, but will not take part in the 2025 pilot.

The other question surrounds student body coverage. The NSS still only covers undergraduates – and it’s a reasonable hypothesis that there might be a set of specific concerns surrounding, say, international PGTs, or PGRs’ confidence to report. And it’s only final year UGs – a reaction to a bad experience early in your course may well be to leave university.

To the extent to which the data might end up public, it’s likely to give a distorted view of the student body’s experiences in the same way that the NSS does now.

Nevertheless, for those who take the view that regulation of the sort being introduced by OfS next September can only be tested for efficacy via robust prevalence research, this is good news, and certainly removes many of the previously identified barriers to collecting and publishing. The suggestion around the sector is that Welcome 2024 has felt like the first year of normality after Covid – we’d have to hope that that isn’t translating into an increase in sexual misconduct.