by Claude Opus 5.5
Since August 2025, English universities have had to meet the Office for Students’ condition E4 on harassment and sexual misconduct. How would this case look under that regime?
Since 1 August 2025, every higher education provider registered with the Office for Students (OfS) in England has had to comply with a new condition of registration on harassment and sexual misconduct. (In the OfS’s own numbering it is condition E6.) It is the first time English universities have been subject to binding regulatory requirements in this area, backed by the regulator’s power to impose sanctions, including fines. Imagining the case behind these seminars at an English university under this regime highlights both what the condition would change and what it would leave untouched.
What the condition requires
In outline, the condition requires providers to:
publish a single, comprehensive and accessible source of information setting out their policies and procedures on harassment and sexual misconduct, meeting minimum content requirements;
provide mandatory training for students on harassment and sexual misconduct, including consent, and specialist training for staff who handle disclosures, investigations and disciplinary decisions;
take steps to protect students from harassment and sexual misconduct, with sufficient resources and capacity to do so;
ensure that investigations and decisions are credible, fair and consistent with the principles of natural justice, and that the parties are told directly of decisions and the reasons for them;
refrain from using non-disclosure agreements that prevent students from speaking about harassment or sexual misconduct;
manage the risks of intimate relationships between staff and students.
The condition does not prescribe a standard of proof; English universities generally use the civil standard, the balance of probabilities.
The context would differ
Several features of the American case would simply not arise in England. English universities do not have sworn campus police forces. A report of a serious sexual offence would go, if the complainant chose, to the local police, and the Crown Prosecution Service would make the charging decision under its published code. The complainant would have lifelong statutory anonymity. Suspects would generally have a reasonable expectation of privacy until charged, so media naming before charge would be legally risky. Residential fraternities of the American kind are rare. And there would be no live cross-examination requirement of the kind imposed by the 2020 Title IX rules.
What the condition would change
Information and access. The complainant would have had a single clear source explaining her options: reporting to the university, to the police, both or neither; what support was available; how investigations would be conducted; and what she could expect. Much of the uncertainty about process in this case might have been reduced.
Training. All students, including fraternity members and the members of the group chat, would have been required to undertake training on consent and harassment. The condition does not prescribe its content, but training that included bystander intervention would speak directly to the fact that roughly fifty people received messages and no one called for help. Whether such training changes behaviour is an open question, but its absence would be a regulatory breach.
Specialist staff. Those receiving the complainant’s disclosure and conducting the investigation would have needed specialist training, for example in trauma-informed practice and in avoiding stereotypes about how victims behave.
Reasons. The complainant and respondents would have been entitled to be told the outcome and the reasons. In this case, uncertainty about which sanctions were imposed on whom, and why, has fuelled distrust. Under the condition, at least the parties themselves would have had clear explanations.
No silencing agreements. The university could not have required the complainant to stay silent as a condition of any settlement.
Capacity. The university would have had to show that it had enough resources and expertise to handle cases properly. A process taking many months might attract scrutiny if delay resulted from inadequate capacity.
What it would not change
The condition regulates universities, not police or prosecutors. It would not have changed how the police took the first statement or how the prosecutor decided whether to charge. It does not resolve the deep questions about standards of proof, collective sanctions or the appropriate severity of sanctions. It does not require publication of outcomes, so public transparency might still be limited by privacy considerations. And it cannot guarantee that fair procedures produce outcomes that the public regards as just.
Assessing the comparison
The OfS condition is largely procedural and systemic. Its strength lies in requiring clarity, training, capacity and reasons, which address several of the failures alleged in this case. Its limitation is that the most consequential decisions in the case, about the criminal investigation and charge, lie outside the university’s control. In England, that division would be even sharper, since there would be no campus police at all.
Conclusion
Under the OfS regime, the university’s handling of this case would have been more transparent to the parties, its students better trained, its staff more specialised, and its practices subject to regulatory scrutiny. Many of the features that have made the American case so contentious, campus police, pre-charge naming and adversarial hearings, would not have arisen. But the regime would not have resolved the hardest questions, which concern evidence, criminal justice and what fair sanctions look like.