Changing the culture: our work on tackling harassment

Our guidance and recommendations support universities to create a culture that promotes equality, diversity and inclusion, and where harassment and hate in all its forms, sexual misconduct and abuse will never be tolerated.  

Any form of harassment against students or staff represents an abuse of power. It goes against the values and standards of behaviour expected across the university community.

A framework to create culture change 

In 2016, we published Changing the culture. The report offers a strategic framework to support universities in addressing and responding to harassment between students.

The report includes five principles to prevent and respond to all forms of harassment which can be customised by each university to use in their own settings. The framework recognises that having policies and processes in place are not enough. They must be underpinned by long term change in institutional culture.  

New guidance: Tackling staff-to-student sexual misconduct 

Our new guidance provides recommendations for universities to prevent sexual harassment by staff to students. 

It builds on the Changing the culture recommendations, and sets out a series of recommendations to support leaders in preventing and responding to this form of harassment by:

• changing the organisational culture
• revising policies and procedures to align staff and student complaints and investigations
• developing practices that better support students
• collecting, analysing and storing data so that patterns of complaints can be identified and addressed     

Find out more.

More guidance 

We have produced more guidance on tackling different forms of harassment:  

• Tackling racial harassment,
• Tackling antisemitism 
• Tackling Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hatred
• Online harassment
• Domestic abuse during Covid-19
• Combat Misconduct project with AVA 

Tracking progress 

Since publishing Changing the culture, we've tracked the progress universities are making in using the guidance.

There is still more universities and the sector needs to do, but these reports show where progress has been made. We've seen most progress in universities working in partnership with their students and students' unions, other universities, third sector organisations, and local and regional communities.

You can find out more in our two reports: 

• Changing the culture: two years on 
• Changing the culture: one year on