Running consent workshops: guidance from Nottingham Trent

The Consent is everything workshops are a collaborative consent education and volunteer programme, developed in partnership between Nottingham Trent Students’ Union and NTU’s Student Support Services. 

The workshop is a 90-minute interactive face-to-face workshop, co-facilitated by trained student volunteers and colleagues. Designed to build skills around recognising and entering healthy communicative relationships, the workshops are essential in our commitment to building a healthy, safe, and respectful community for all students. 

The programme is a result of years of recommendations from the National Union of Students (NUS), Universities UK (UUK), and students themselves, resulting in a record-breaking student vote on Nottingham Trent Students’ Union’s website for mandatory workshops. 

Following on from best practice in the USA and Australia, we’ve implemented mandatory sessions, understanding the vital need to deliver this content to all incoming students. 

The workshop content was designed in-house by the Consent Lead Team, a collaborative group of colleagues from across the university and students’ union. 

The content has fluctuated over the years due to regular student feedback, but it was initially based on two-evidence based workshops, the NUS’s I heart consent programme and the University of Michigan’s Relationship remix workshop. 

Rooted in behaviour change theory, the content is designed to be empowering and educational, inspiring students to take control of their wants and needs.

The current workshop provides:

• An exploration of giving and receiving consent
• An understanding of consent in student-written hypothetical scenarios
• Sexual violence myth busting
• Supporting a friend
• Signposting to support agencies

Since the creation of the first workshop in 2018, 20,105 students have attended a consent workshop. Each year since, the programme has become embedded in student timetables with over 70% of incoming students having participated. 

The programme is measured against six objectives and the extensive evaluation shows the programme to be overwhelmingly effective for students. 

Students are asked to fill out a survey directly after attending their workshop. The 2023–24 survey results show:

• 85% are more aware of situations that require consent.
• 85% are more aware of sexual assault myths present in society.
• 86% are more confident in giving consent in situations that require it.
• 88% are more confident in receiving consent in situations that require it.
• 94% know how to signpost a friend who discloses they have been sexually assaulted or raped.
• 82% would recommend the workshop to other students.

In addition to programme participants, each year between 40–60 NTU students volunteer their time to train as a workshop facilitator and are asked to facilitate at least 10 workshops across the year. This ensures the programme is student-led, a model that is proven to be effective in student-interventions. 

Though not intended to be the primary purpose of the initiative, the volunteer programme has grown into a community for student leaders, some of whom are survivors themselves, to give back and use their voice to make a difference at their institution. 

Student volunteers measured their own growth and development on a pre- and post-programme survey from the start of the end of the year, with 100% of volunteers increasing their skills in the following categories:

• Facilitation skills
• Public speaking
• Time management
• Communication
• IT/tech skills
• Answering student questions

The consent programme makes up only a part of a comprehensive sexual violence and harassment prevention and response approach at NTU. 

As well as the consent programme for undergraduate students, we deliver consent workshops to all further education students and fresher’s team captains at the beginning of the academic year. We offer a complementing bystander intervention workshop to students that focuses on building skills on how to safely intervene in situations of harm, including sexual violence, hate crime, and microaggressions. 

Recognising this work can’t be delivered by itself, we also offer a robust colleague training model, in which all colleagues are required to participate in an online ‘Responding to sexual violence disclosures’ module and student-facing colleagues are offered a further interactive module to explore the topic further. 

As proud members of Nottingham’s Consent coalition, we’ve worked with local and statutory organisations, experts in the field of sexual violence, to develop three nationally-recognised campaigns that raise awareness of consent across the country. The most recent campaign, the A-Z of consent – nighttime version, is proudly displayed across Nottingham’s buses and trams, a campaign where visibility is the first step of changing culture. 

We look forward to delivering the fourth year of the consent programme and creating further interventions that continue to make our city and campuses safer for students.