Welsh universities have a regulatory deadline of 1 August 2026, and with the Harassment and Sexual Misconduct addition to the OIA’s Good Practice Framework due for publication this year, there may be significant challenges on the horizon.
From 1 August, all providers registered with the Commission for Tertiary Education and Research (MEDR) will be required to demonstrate that they have appropriate and proportionate arrangements in place to protect the welfare and safety of their staff and learners.
Under MEDR’s Staff and Learner Welfare Condition, “safety” is defined to include freedom from harassment, misconduct, violence (including sexual violence) and hate. Like E6 in England, it’s a registration condition and, like E6, failing to meet it puts a provider’s registration at risk.
So what does this actually require? And what does it mean in practice for how Welsh universities handle some of their most serious and sensitive cases?
What does the welfare condition require?
The Welfare Condition creates three obligations:
- Providers must conduct an annual self-evaluation of their welfare and safety arrangements. This is an internal exercise and it doesn’t go to MEDR as standard, but it must be reviewed and approved by the governing body. This is meaningful; it holds leadership accountable and not just professional services teams.
- Providers must produce a two-year welfare action plan and submit it to MEDR. This is the document that sits with the regulator. It signals priorities, identifies gaps, and commits the institution to action. Getting it right matters, not just for compliance but because it shapes what MEDR sees when it looks at your institution.
- Providers must complete an annual assurance and compliance return. This is the ongoing mechanism through which MEDR monitors whether the condition is being met.
What does this mean for sexual misconduct, harassment, and hate?
The Welfare Condition doesn’t prescribe exactly how institutions must respond to sexual misconduct, harassment, or hate incidents. MEDR’s framework is less directive than the OfS approach in England which includes specific requirements around definitions, non-disclosure agreements, and staff-student relationships. However, less prescriptive doesn’t mean less demanding. It means the responsibility for getting it right sits with institutions themselves.
What does a self-evaluation that’s genuinely fit for purpose require? It needs to be honest about where gaps exist; whether in policies, processes, or how cases are actually handled in practice.
It should reflect the experience of students and staff who have been through those processes, not just the institution’s view of how well it’s working. And it needs to engage with Wales’s specific legal and policy context.
The Violence Against Women, Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence (Wales) Act 2015 creates a statutory framework that applies across Welsh public bodies, including universities. MEDR itself published guidance in 2024 (MEDR/2024/05) on tackling VAWDASV in higher education. The guidance signals the direction of travel, and institutions that haven’t already engaged with it will likely find the self-evaluation process much more challenging.
The self-evaluation
Unlike some regulatory requirements, the self-evaluation isn’t something that requires submission to the regulator and MEDR won’t routinely scrutinise it. Your institution’s governance will review it and then it informs the action plan, but the rigour of that process depends entirely on the institution itself.
This can create a real risk: if the self-evaluation is designed to reassure rather than to honestly examine, the action plan that follows will be built on those foundations. And if that comes to light (through a complaint, a media story, or a regulatory inquiry) it will be very difficult to argue that the institution was genuinely meeting the condition.
Honest self-evaluation may require uncomfortable questions…
- Are your policies for responding to sexual misconduct actually trauma-informed?
- Do your investigators have the specialist training they need?
- Are decision-makers sufficiently independent from the investigation process?
- Are students and staff from different backgrounds (including those targeted by hate) experiencing your processes as fair?
What good practice looks like
The institutions that will navigate this most confidently and effectively are those that have already built robust, specialist capacity in this area. That means having policies that are clearly written, regularly reviewed, and appropriately used in practice. It means trained investigators who understand the impact of trauma (and how to apply this to their practice), who know how to take accounts from people who have experienced serious harm, and who can conduct fair and thorough processes. It also means decision-making panels that are genuinely independent, receive complete information, and apply consistent standards.
It also means being able to demonstrate all of this to university governance and, if asked, to MEDR. The action plan doesn’t just need to be a compliance document. It can be an opportunity to show that welfare and safety measures are taken seriously at the throughout the institution.
How I can help before 1 August 2026
There are three months until the MEDR framework goes live. That’s enough time to make meaningful progress, but likely not enough to start from scratch at the last minute.
At Campus Resolve I work with universities and other higher education providers on exactly the issues the Welfare Condition is designed to address. My practice is trauma-informed, which means the work isn’t just technically compliant but is built on an understanding of how serious and complex harm affects people and what fair and sensitive processes actually look like in practice.
Specifically, I can help with:
- Policy and procedure review.
- If your existing policies and procedures for handling reports of sexual misconduct, harassment, or hate haven’t been reviewed recently, now is the right time. I can assess them against good practice and the MEDR condition and guidance and suggest practical improvements.
- Trauma-informed investigations training.
- MEDR’s condition will only be met in practice if the people running investigations are equipped to do so sensitively and fairly. My training covers the skills investigators need: taking accounts from survivors, managing bias, maintaining appropriate separation between investigation and decision-making functions, and understanding how trauma can affect how people give evidence.
- Self-evaluation and action plan support.
- If you want an independent perspective on your self-evaluation, or support in developing an action plan that’s honest about gaps and realistic about priorities, I can assist with that process.
- External investigations.
- Where cases require external investigation (because of the seriousness of the allegations, a conflict of interest, or a lack of internal capacity) I take on external investigation work directly or advise via a retainer package.
For how Wales compares with the rest of the UK and Ireland, see our regulatory landscape timeline.
If you want to talk about how I can help, feel free to get in touch at jenny@campusresolve.co.uk