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Writer's pictureCamille Schloeffel

Student Safety and Security Accreditation Scheme for UK Universities: ProtectED

I interviewed Lisa Ravenscroft, the Communications Manager at ProtectED. ProtectED is the first UK higher education accreditation scheme to look comprehensively across student safety and security. The need for ProtectED is rooted in the recognition that universities have a wider role to play in supporting the safety and wellbeing of their students not only while they are on campus, but throughout their student experience. At the heart of ProtectED is partnership working — because student safety, security and wellbeing are a matter of collaboration rather than the responsibility of one service.


Location: Zoom (Manchester and London, England, UK!).


ProtectED was created when Brian Nuttall (Director) and Trevor Jones (Head of Security) were having conversations about how there is no legal requirement or basic compliance standards for universities' duty of care for the safety and security of students. Together, they started talking to people working in the space of student safety and security to break down what the main problems were and formulate solutions.


The whole purpose of the project is to get people to work together and stop working in silos.

They wanted to break down the silos of work across campuses, so they decided to bring important issues (such as sexual violence and mental health) together to create a Code of Practice. ProtectED works across campus teams to connect and encourage them to collaborate and share information with each other to create a more comprehensively safe and secure campus environment.


The ProtectED Code of Practice covers five areas – the Core and four instruments.



Core Institutional Safety and Security

This includes ensuring security teams are trained adequately to support students, through mental health training, suicide prevention training and responding to disclosures of sexual violence. This is because there is a need for people in security to be able to help students with incidents and respond appropriately. Signing up to ProtectED ensures that universities have plans in place when there are incidents, and that every security officer at the university has the relevant qualifications for their role.


Instrument 1: Student Wellbeing and Mental Health

Student wellbeing and mental health is a really important part of the ProtectED accreditation process. This instrument includes ensuring university staff have comprehensive mental health care training, connecting different teams on campus and joining up services to ensure it is a more comprehensive service. ProtectED looks at how university services are actually used and accessed by students and checks if this is fit-for-purpose. They also check in on what support the university provides to first responders (such as security) and friends/witnesses of incidents.


Instrument 2: International Students

International students are a specific area of focus across all parts of the safety and security of a campus, because of their unique needs on campus that universities often fail to meet. ProtectED especially looks to ensure services are easily identifiable by international students, including checking whether language like ‘wellbeing’ and ‘suicide’ is used as this is not translatable to certain cultures that are dominant on campus (e.g. Chinese students may not understand what the term ‘wellbeing’ is when first arriving, so may not know what the service is or how to access it). They also focus on engaging the whole community to support international students by getting people into the support areas who can speak different languages, training administrative staff and other staff in residential halls (such as tradespersons, cleaners, etc.) on how to identify changes in behaviour and flag that with the appropriate channels. ProtectED also requires the university to have systems in place to support international students to set up their phone, pick them up from the airport, educate them on scams, and educate them on what personal behaviour is and is not okay (such as abuse, harassment and discrimination).


Instrument 3: Student Harassment and Sexual Assault

Sexual assault and harassment is unfortunately common amongst student populations, so ProtectED have a large focus on prevention and intervention from the beginning of a student's journey at a university. This includes going through what is acceptable and unacceptable behaviour with new students, providing information about their support and report options, how to support peers if something happens and knowing what procedures are in place for incidents like sexual violence and suicide attempts.


Instrument 4: Student Night Out

Knowing what support must be in place for students on nights out is very important, especially for rural university communities where travelling to and from bars and clubs is more complex. For example, in rural universities, ProtectEd ensure systems are set up for students to be able to get to and from town safely, such as having organised transport (like buses/coaches) to bring students back or deals with taxi services so students can get home without paying at the time (and instead can pay later through the university to the taxi company). This also includes training staff within nightlife establishments about the role they can play to keep their patrons safe.


Universities who commit to the Code of Practice must abide by these five instruments to become and remain accredited with ProtectED. Universities who sign up have to submit hundreds of documents and then have those documents processed and looked at by expert peer-reviewers. In doing this, they go through a process of building partnerships across campus, checking their services by doing focus groups with students of different year groups within the university to understand what they are actually experiencing on campus. This is important as they do not take what the university says at face value. Once a university has achieved accreditation, they have to renew every three years to ensure they are keeping up with emerging safety and security needs.


It’s all about reputation rather than safety in universities. We advocate that universities should publish their incidents and results of investigations transparently.

Considering this process is time and resource intensive, ProtectED have faced some pushback by universities who claim it is too hard and that they cannot commit to such a process. This disappointing response has led Ravenscroft and her team to explore future legislative options with Universities UK to make universities improve and commit to change to keep students safe. Unfortunately this type of compliance will be necessary to get some universities on board.


The development of ProtectED is supported by the ProtectED Advisory Board — a group of public and private sector experts in standards development and issues of student safety, security and wellbeing. Ravenscroft and her team meet with the Advisory Board when considering any changes to their Code of Practice and when organising any specific initiatives or events.


We focus on staying involved and being interactive with the sector so that we know what is happening.

Ravenscroft is the person that brings everyone together and remains in regular contact with all of their stakeholders to hear about their work, how they are going and if there is anything ProtectED can do to support their efforts in student safety and security. She also organises their yearly big event with the Advisory Board and universities that have signed up to the Code of Practice to build partnerships across the sector and stay engaged.


Ravenscroft and her team have a strong focus on ensuring universities have collaborative, integrated approaches across the university and with the broader community to keep students safe and have appropriate mechanisms for support when incidents occur. Their focus on the systems and structures of universities demonstrates how they see student safety and wellbeing the responsibility of the institution.


Thank you Lisa Ravenscroft for your time speaking with me. I am so grateful to have spoken to a leader in keeping students safe on UK campuses and think something like this is desperately needed in Australia to hold universities accountable to creating and sustaining safe learning environments.


In solidarity,

Camille Schloeffel


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