Every learner has the right to feel safe throughout their education and training – whichever environment they’re in.
We’ve recently launched a new sexual safety hub, to provide further support to victims, survivors and witnesses of sexual misconduct, harassment and abuse.
The hub draws together new and existing resources to support members of the public, those working within health and social care, education providers, and employers.
It’s important that employers and education providers show leadership and create the right culture and safer environments.
Our Head of Education, Jamie Hunt, explores what education providers should consider when taking steps to keep people safe.
Make the expectations of individuals clear
Many academic and practice-based staff are HCPC registrants, and therefore must meet our standards of conduct, performance and ethics, which are clear about maintaining professional boundaries and a duty to report inappropriate behaviour.
We require education providers to directly support their staff and practice educators in their role with learners, which should include these expected behaviours. This means education providers should be taking active steps to create a culture that supports people to speak up – this could include anything from building conversations into personal development reviews, through to ensuring people are clear about the processes in place to raise a concern.
Our education standards make the responsibilities of education providers clear:
Education providers must support learners to understand acceptable behaviours, and how to raise any unacceptable behaviours through informal and formal mechanisms. They must ensure that there is no detrimental effect on an individual’s learning should issues be raised (SET 3.15).
This applies to any situation where unwanted sexual behaviours are present – from education provider or practice staff, or peers. Education providers must have formal learner fitness to practice procedures in place, where they consider whether learners are suitable to become a registered professional (SET 3.16).
A case study from Health Education and Improvement Wales includes a new reflective toolkit, which supports people to speak up across a wide range of matters. From providing advice about what can constitute a concern, through to explaining what people can expect at each stage of the process – this type of support can help to make the difference between someone coming forward about a concern and not.
If education providers have concerns about individuals, they should work within their own HR processes, or with their practice partners on these concerns, and where appropriate directly refer concerns to us.
Taking responsibility of the overall education and training environment
It is each education provider’s responsibility to ensure that their learners are safe within all education and training environments – including practice-based learning environments.
We recognise that this can come with challenges – in particular, understanding and influencing the culture of practice-based learning environments. We also recognise that often, there are a small number of organisations who offer practice-based learning.
However, it’s important that education providers education providers have systems in place to ensure that practice-based learning is undertaken in a safe and supportive environment (SET 5.4).
As part of their responsibilities, education providers must monitor the safety of practice-based learning environments, and take action where they have concerns – even if this leads to difficult decisions (such as trying to find alternative practice-based learning opportunities).
Education providers must monitor their practice-based learning to maintain alignment with our standards. We suggest that education providers include the following as part of their monitoring:
Using sources of information, such as National Education and Training Survey (NETS) results (in England) – education providers should use the NETS reporting tool to understand how each of their practice education providers are performing linked to specific questions, including sexual safety, and how that compares to benchmarks.
Specific feedback mechanisms from learners, which include gathering feedback on sexual safety.
Education providers will be conscious there are often multiple education providers linked to each practice-based provider. Where possible, education providers should consider any issues raised collectively, so that they are able to come to shared concerns or solutions.
Education providers and others should also consider whether there are systemic issues which need to be reported to systems regulators (such as the Care Quality Commission (in England)), or directly to us.
