Three regulators, one prevention system for universities

Three regulatory frameworks now govern the same conduct in Australian universities. Work health and safety law treats gendered violence, harassment and bullying as psychosocial hazards. The positive duty under the Sex Discrimination Act requires proactive, reasonable and proportionate measures to eliminate them. And since 1 January 2026, the National Higher Education Code to Prevent and Respond to Gender-based Violence has imposed seven enforceable standards on providers.

In most institutions, these obligations are held by three different teams — who have often never sat in a room together. The result is duplicated effort, contradictory processes, and harm that sits in the gap between frameworks, where no single owner is looking.

This half-day workshop builds shared legal literacy across all three obligations — then does the harder work of translating them into one integrated prevention and response system, grounded in behavioural science.

It doesn't stop at compliance. Legal literacy is the first hour. The rest is design: behaviour in systems, the COM-B model and the Behaviour Change Wheel, the hierarchy of control applied honestly to a behavioural hazard, and integrated assurance built on one evidence base, one governance line, one plan.

What you'll leave able to do

• Name the duty holder, legal test, coverage and regulator for each of the three frameworks — and say where they overlap and where they genuinely diverge

• Apply the WHS risk management cycle and the hierarchy of control to a behavioural hazard

• Map your institution's current activity against all three frameworks at once, finding duplication, contradiction and real gaps

• Use the COM-B model to turn a legal obligation into an intervention that actually shifts behaviour

• Design integrated assurance that satisfies all three regulators

• Explain to the board why compliance is the floor and not the objective

Who should attend

Executive and governance leaders, WHS managers and advisers, HR and workplace relations staff, student safety and Code leads, EDI and culture practitioners, and residential and student life teams. The session works best when several people from the same institution attend together — the whole point is to connect obligations that are usually kept separate.

This session is only for those working within a university.

What's included

Every registration includes the full Mind the Gap participant workbook — a twelve-worksheet toolkit you'll use during the session and take back to your institution, including the three-framework comparison, the hierarchy-of-control audit, the COM-B design template and an integrated assurance map. Sessions use a teaching case study to work through a realistic scenario from disclosure to system redesign.

Format

Half-day, 12:00 – 4:30 pm AEST, delivered live via Zoom with a short break.

Not a webinar you watch; a workshop you work in.

TICKET TYPES

Individual registration — $405 (inclusive of GST)
Includes full participation and the Mind the Gap participant workbook. Suitable for individuals and small teams wanting to understand how the three obligations fit together.

Bringing your whole institution?
This open session is designed as an entry point. Universities that want to embed this work run the tailored, in-house version of Mind the Gap — adapted to their jurisdiction, provider type and structure, for up to 25 people. Institutions that book the in-house workshop after attending an open session receive a discounted rate.

Email kelsey@kelseypaskeconsulting.com to discuss.

ABOUT KELSEY

Kelsey Paske is the founder and principal of Kelsey Paske Consulting, working across Australia and the United Kingdom on the prevention of gendered violence, bullying, harassment and discrimination in higher education, government and sport.

She has spent more than a decade working on gender-based violence prevention in universities, both in-house and as a consultant — including in-house roles at La Trobe University, University College London, Advance HE, and as Head of Success at Culture Shift UK, where she developed a prevention strategy for more than seventy UK university partners. Since returning to Australia in 2021, she has worked as a Senior Advisor to Our Watch within the Tasmanian Government on primary prevention, and now consults to universities and organisations including Monash University, the University of South Australia, University College Dublin, Imperial College London, Women's Legal Services Victoria and Tasmania, Motorsport Australia and AFL Tasmania.

Her practice is grounded in evidence-based prevention practice, trauma-informed principles and the full prevention spectrum — primary prevention, early intervention and effective response.