Students made today happen. We should thank them

Today marks what I might call "heavy sandbags day” for universities in England.

Jim Dickinson

Jim is an Associate Editor (SUs) at Wonkhe

Liv Bailey (2009-11)

When Terence Kealey, then VC at the University of Buckingham, publicly described attractive female students as a “perk” to be enjoyed “at a safe distance” by male academics, NUS Women’s Officer Liv Bailey responded firmly:

Regardless of whether this is an attempt at humour, it is completely unacceptable for someone in Terence Kealey’s position to compare a lecture theatre to a lap-dancing club… he does a disservice not only to the many female scholars who have struggled to get a foothold in academia, but also the many bright female students who have got their good grades through nothing more exciting than hard work.

The incident exemplified the leadership that would characterise the decade – student activists driving change while university leaders remained largely defensive.

Bailey’s approach combined traditional student representative tactics with rigorous research. Her key innovation was commissioning the first comprehensive national online survey of 2,058 women students that revealed alarming statistics – one in seven had experienced serious physical or sexual assault during their studies, over two-thirds had experienced verbal or non-verbal harassment, and crucially, very few reported their experiences to institutions or police.

Bailey established the evidentiary foundation for all subsequent campaigns, moving the debate from anecdotal concerns to documented widespread problems. Her research approach gave student activists legitimacy in institutional settings and created the “Hidden Marks” framework that would guide policy discussions for years.

Most importantly, she introduced the concept of “zero tolerance” policies as an achievable institutional goal. If nothing else, Bailey emphasised the isolation victims faced:

At the moment, women students are too often being forced to pick themselves up and carry on, without any help or support from their institution. Many women students are left feeling alone, and feeling like they are to blame for the violence committed against them. This report is a wake-up call.

Estelle Hart (2011-12)

Hart inherited Bailey’s research but faced persistent institutional denial. In Wales, where she began her work, she encountered the assumption that:

…sexual assault is something that happens when a stranger randomly attacks you, and university campuses were assumed to be this safe place, this bubble where that wasn’t happening.

Hart’s tactical innovation was to select findings that complemented rather than challenged policymakers’ preconceptions about “stranger danger” to gain access to decision-making spaces. Once inside, she could introduce more complex conversations about acquaintance violence and institutional culture.

Hart successfully expanded the conversation beyond feminist society meetings and into mainstream student politics. Her strategic approach to “lad culture” created the first systematic critique of campus environments that normalized harassment, and she pioneered the approach of using accessible entry points (like concerns about walking home safely) to open discussions about more complex issues (like acquaintance rape and institutional responsibility).

And her broader mission was to expand the conversation beyond feminist society meetings:

When I first got involved it was all dominated by people from quite elite universities, a lot of people were studying gender – the cliché would be a bunch of us sat around theorising about the patriarchy with language that no one else understands, and occasionally shouting at passers-by in power.

Hart also pioneered discussions about “lad culture,” despite criticism:

Plenty of people said I was stupid for doing it. If you’ve got evidence of serious sexual assaults why would you start banging on about lad mags and lad culture? But the women we were talking to knew that a led to b.

Her approach proved successful in engaging male student leaders, often transforming initial hostility into genuine support for campus change through lengthy conversations that:

…almost always ended with a desire to know more or a request to help campaigns on campus.”

Ironically, it’s now wholly unclear whether tackling wider cultures of this sort would fall foul of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act – although “Prevent” guidance still advocates intervening in “permissive environments”.

Kelley Temple (2012-14)

Temple’s experience touring Scottish student councils revealed how normalised harassment had become. She encountered arguments like these:

…if you have zero tolerance policies, then what’s going to happen is you’re going to increase the level of rapes. Because if men can touch women in nightclubs, and they’re less likely to go into rape, right?

Temple identified reputation as the key barrier to institutional action:

I’d never really thought about reputation, but higher education seems to be historically built around it, and when you add in a version of that being used to sell universities, it was obvious that a lot of the resistance was about reputational risk.

Her strategy was to shift the reputational risk from admitting problems existed to failing to address them.

Temple commissioned the landmark report “That’s what she said: Women students’ experiences of ‘lad culture’ in higher education” (2013), which provided the first comprehensive analysis of how campus cultures enabled harassment.

She transformed Bailey’s “zero tolerance” concept into a practical accreditation scheme that SUs could obtain, making anti-harassment work both visible and desirable, and demonstrating that you could establish a framework that would apply across a sector to both prevent and prosecute harassment.

Most significantly, she helped establish the link between everyday harassment and serious sexual violence, creating the theoretical framework for cultural change approaches.

Her 2013 report coincided with debates over “Blurred Lines” by Robin Thicke. When Edinburgh University Students’ Association banned the song, Temple defended the practical rationale:

By then the NUS Women’s Campaign had taken zero tolerance to sexual harassment thing that Liv had started and for a couple of years had been making it something you could get accredited for… So a lot of SUs were actually talking about their own venues and listening to women who were saying look, when that song comes on, we’re getting groped.

Temple also pushed on the crucial importance of visible senior leadership support, which in her case from NUS National President Toni Pearce:

You just can’t underestimate how important it is to have the ultimate leader… backing you up all the time. When people aren’t sure they look to the leader for a signal, and every single time she stood there and said yes, this really is important, it’s who we are.

Susuana Amoah (2014-16)

Amoah began her tenure by examining the implementation of the “zero tolerance” schemes Temple had created. She found that many institutions were “ticking boxes” without creating real change:

Nobody likes being told it’s them or their campus or their venue do they… I was meeting with a senior manager in the SU and they said well what do you suggest? I was all well why are you asking me, I’m a second year student. So from day one, I knew there was something wrong with the zero tolerance thing. We had to try something else.

Inside universities, using systematic policy analysis, Amoah discovered that universities across the sector were using nearly identical sexual misconduct policies that effectively prevented them from taking action.

She traced it back to the 1994 Zellick report, which advised universities to avoid processing allegations until police investigations concluded – guidance that remained influential twenty years later.

As such, she achieved one of the most significant policy breakthroughs of the decade by successfully lobbying for the revision of the Zellick guidance through the government’s 2015 taskforce.

This removed the primary legal barrier preventing universities from investigating sexual misconduct cases. She also pioneered survivor-centered policy development by systematically consulting campus activists about ideal support systems, creating the template for trauma-informed institutional responses:

It was being used as the sort of guidance that helped universities do nothing… of course we don’t have any policies, we don’t need to because it’s not our responsibility.

She embarked on what we might call intensive policy activism, eventually leveraging the government’s 2015 taskforce on campus violence to commission revised legal guidance from Pincent Masons.

And when the taskforce sought input on survivor support systems, Amoah consulted campus activists:

It poured out of them. They had ideas for training, investigation systems that are survivor-centred, what a fair process would feel like. Of course they had all the answers. It’s just that no-one had ever asked them.

Hareem Ghani (2016-18)

Following the 2016 Universities UK report “Changing the Culture,” Ghani inherited a sector that had finally acknowledged student-to-student violence but remained silent on staff misconduct.

She immediately identified this as her priority campaign while also refining approaches to consent education and bystander intervention.

Ghani discovered that consent workshops alone were insufficient:

The problem was this idea that knowledge alone was power. Once they did know and you listened to them, what they would say is OK, but how would we stop it? They wanted to know what to do if their friends were going too far, or if they were at an event and saw something inappropriate.

Ghani commissioned the first national UK survey on staff-student sexual misconduct, “Power in the Academy,” working with the 1752 Group to gather responses from 1,839 current and former students.

That research revealed that four in ten current students had experienced sexualized behavior from staff, breaking the silence around academic abuse of power. She also developed the theoretical framework for understanding power dynamics in higher education relationships and promoted peer-delivered, “train the trainer” approaches to consent education.

On staff misconduct, she encountered familiar patterns of institutional protection:

So much of it was geared towards protecting the reputation of the institution, which meant that sometimes even if a staff member had all these allegations against them, well, they’re a well known staff member. So it’s better to keep them at the institution.

Ghani identified a fundamental resistance to learning from students:

A lot of senior leadership don’t take students seriously. They assume it’s dramatising and dismiss it instead of being curious about it.

Sarah Lasoye (2018-19)

Lasoye successfully extended the work beyond universities by launching the first comprehensive study of students’ experiences and perceptions of sexual harassment, violence and domestic abuse in further education colleges. That expansion was crucial – it brought the frameworks developed for higher education to a sector serving more diverse student populations, many from more disadvantaged backgrounds.

Rachel Watters (2019-20)

Watters launched a collaborative project with AVA (Against Violence and Abuse) and Universities UK on developing a “whole university approach” to misconduct on campus. This represented the culmination of the decade’s work – moving from student-led campaigns to sector-wide, institutionally embedded approaches. Her work on consent education refined earlier models and created sustainable frameworks for ongoing prevention work.

The decade of student leadership shows us how each officer built strategically upon their predecessor’s achievements to create systematic change across higher education. The progression was clear:

Bailey established the research foundation and legitimacy
Hart expanded the conversation and built coalitions
Temple created practical frameworks and cultural analysis
Amoah achieved legal and policy reform
Ghani addressed power dynamics and staff misconduct
Lasoye extended work to further education
Watters achieved institutional integration

Their success stemmed from several key approaches – using rigorous research to gain legitimacy, selecting strategic entry points that resonated with institutional concerns, building broad coalitions beyond traditional activist circles, and maintaining survivor-centered perspectives throughout policy development.

Since then, OfS has taken up the mantle – moving (glacially at times) from advice to formal regulation. The new rules won’t fix everything overnight – there are plenty of unresolved issues, the reputational issues persist, and my scan of several providers this morning suggests that the regulator will have a job on its hands in even enforcing some of the basics.

But more broadly, the story reveals both the potential and the burden placed on student leaders in driving social change. Each officer inherited the work of their predecessors and pushed it forward, creating a cumulative impact that transformed how higher education approaches gender-based violence.

Most importantly, it would not have happened without them. On the train home tonight I’ll be raising a little toast to their tenacity, commitment, bravery and leadership – and hoping that the mantle of finishing the job, and actually achieving implementation of E6, is gripped by today’s generation of SU officers.

Wonk Corner | 1/08/25