From our webinar: Higher Ed and the National Code: Fix systems not people
For our second National Code session, Miks sat down with Dr Fee Mozeley, Project Manager for the Athena Swan accreditation program at Science in Australia Gender Equity (SAGE), to talk about what the Code is actually asking institutions to do.
Fee works with Australian universities on gender-based violence practice. SAGE’s gender-based violence community of practice is their most attended, with representation from every single university subscriber. She has seen what works, what does not, and what the gap looks like between an institution that is compliant on paper and one that has actually shifted something.
The conversation covered systems thinking, the real tensions in implementing the Code, and what providers with limited resourcing should do first. Here are some of the core takeaways from that session.
1. Compliance lives above the waterline. Change happens below it
Fee opened with an iceberg.
Everything visible sits above the surface. Your gender-based violence policy, your reporting pathways, your training completion rates, your steering committee. It is necessary. The Code requires it. But on its own, it is not enough.
“Responding well to the Code means working below the waterline, not just assembling the documents that show above it.”
— Fee Mozeley, SAGE
Below the surface is where the conditions actually live. Fee broke these into three categories:
Structural: who owns the risk, whether accountability reaches the executive, how responsibility follows students beyond the classroom and into accommodation, online spaces, and professional placements.
Cultural: what gets tolerated and what gets rewarded, whether staff believe a disclosure will be handled well, whether people trust the system enough to use it.
Informational: whose experiences are visible in your data, what language you use to collect it, and whether what you learn actually loops back to inform your decisions.
Miks put it simply during the session: less time on paperwork, more time on people. The paperwork is the visible layer. The people are what sits beneath it.
2. The Code is not asking institutions to fix individuals. It is asking them to fix systems
This was the central reframe of the session and it is worth sitting with.
Most institutions approach gender-based violence by focusing on the people involved. Training the staff member, supporting the student, responding to the incident. Those things matter. But the Code is asking for something upstream of all of them.
“Gender-based violence is one of the most serious systemic barriers because it affects whether people feel safe, whether they belong, and whether they can fully participate.”
— Fee Mozeley, SAGE
A gender equity lens asks whose experiences are being prioritised or deprioritised, intentionally or not. It asks what the conditions are that determine who is exposed to risk, who feels able to report, and how people experience institutional processes.
Miks connected this to what Capyble sees in the broader landscape:
“It is not that they do not care. It is that they do not know what to do. And that is exactly why we need to fix the systems, not keep asking individuals to carry what the system should be holding.”
— Miks, Capyble
The positive duty framework and the National Code are both pointing in the same direction. Stop waiting for something to go wrong. Build the conditions that make harm less likely in the first place.
3. The tension between trauma-informed practice and procedural fairness is real. And it needs attention.
Fee named a tension that most institutions have not yet worked through.
The Code calls for person-centred, trauma-informed approaches. It also calls for procedural fairness. These are not competing principles, but they do create real complexity in practice.
“The aim is not to choose between safety and fairness. It is to design processes that can uphold both without compounding or compromising that agency.”
— Fee Mozeley, SAGE
Fee gave a concrete example. A student discloses an incident but asks the provider not to investigate because they fear retaliation or social isolation. Under the Code, if there is a potential ongoing risk to others, the institution has an obligation to at least conduct a risk assessment. The trauma-informed principle says uphold the agency and wishes of the discloser. The procedural requirement says you may still need to act.
That tension does not have a clean answer. But it has to be thought through in advance, not in the moment of a disclosure. Fee’s message was clear: spend time below the waterline working out how your processes can hold both, before someone is sitting across the desk from you.
4. More disclosures is not a sign things are getting worse. It is often a sign your culture is getting safer
This was one of the most counterintuitive moments in the conversation and one of the most important.
Fee noted that universities in SAGE’s community of practice keep reporting the same thing: disclosures are going up. The instinct is to read that as a failure. It is not.
“It doesn’t automatically mean that prevention has failed. It often means that people are starting to trust the system enough to use it.”
— Fee Mozeley, SAGE
Miks connected it to something Capyble sees regularly. Board members at higher education institutions sometimes look at zero disclosures and take it as a good sign. It rarely is. Zero disclosures usually means people do not believe anything will happen if they come forward.
“You create a culture safe enough to start to see the problem for what it is, quantify it, and then address it.”
— Miks, Capyble
The goal is not a number on a report. It is an environment where people feel safe enough to use the pathways that exist. That is the shift the Code is trying to create.
5. Most institutional systems quietly enable gender-based violence to persist. That is not an accusation. It is a starting point
Most large institutional systems enable gender-based violence to persist. Not because the people in them are bad. But because institutions exist within a society that enables it, and the systems inside institutions reflect that.
“Our institutes exist within our society and our society enables gender-based violence. That is the context in which we are doing this work.”
— Fee Mozeley, SAGE
This is not a reason for despair but for intentionality. The work has to be deliberate. It has to go below the waterline (see the visual above). And it has to be connected to the broader picture, including the national plan to end violence against women and children, and the way that institutional change and societal change feed each other.
Fee was also clear that data collection is a critical part of this. Historically, data collection has ignored compounding intersectional disadvantages. Whose experiences are you actually capturing? Who has been left out? And what are you doing with what you find? Gathering information that does not loop back into decisions is not enough.
6. No one is starting from scratch. Start with what you have
For providers feeling the weight of the January 2027 deadline, Fee’s answer to where to begin was direct and reassuring.
“No one is starting from scratch. The key thing that came out of our community of practice was: do a mapping exercise. Start by identifying what you have and then apply a bit of a gap analysis.”
— Fee Mozeley, SAGE
From there: name one accountable executive, set up a small diverse working group to guide the process, and prioritise your highest risks. If you identify gaps you cannot address internally, that becomes an early action item in itself.
Fee was also clear about the deadline. Missing it is not ideal. But the regulator has shown genuine openness to context and complexity. They came and spoke at SAGE’s community of practice, ran a Q&A, and demonstrated they understand the intensity of what is being asked.
“Your first plan is never your right plan. It has to always be a living document you come back to.”
— Fee Mozeley, SAGE
For smaller institutions worried about proportionality: your actions should match your context, your scale, and your risk. The Code is not asking every provider to build what a large university has. It is asking every provider to show they are genuinely working on it.
Questions from the room
These came from attendees during the session.
How do we get leadership buy-in when resources are already stretched?
Fee’s answer was direct: the Code is your leverage. It is not negotiable, and it tells institutions not just what to do but how to do it. That is unusual for regulatory frameworks and it is something leaders need to understand. You cannot adopt a trauma-informed approach unless the whole organisation is adopting it. That means leadership has to be across it, not just the people in student wellbeing or compliance. The Code gives you the mandate to make that case.
What happens if we miss the January 2027 deadline?
You do not want to. But if you do, transparent communication with the regulator is key. Your first plan does not have to be perfect. What matters is that you have one, that it is a living document, and that you can show you are genuinely working on it.
What does good practice look like versus minimum compliance?
We are careful not to speak on behalf of the regulator, but drew on what SAGE’s community of practice is hearing. Good practice goes below the waterline. It means being able to show the evidence base and rationale for why your compliance mechanisms are set up the way they are. Ticking boxes is the floor, not the ceiling. Good practice means you can demonstrate you are looking at your structural, cultural, and informational conditions and using what you find to inform decisions.
Final thoughts
The gap between ticking boxes and creating tangible change is real. Fee named it clearly: you can have everything above the waterline in place and still not see the impact you are looking for.
The Code is asking for something harder and more important than compliance. It is asking institutions to look at the conditions that allow harm to persist and to change them deliberately, over time, with accountability at the top.
That work is possible. No one is doing it perfectly yet, and no one is starting from scratch.
