A new era dawned for academic freedom and campus free speech in England on 1 September 2026.
After 18 months of drift following the Government’s January 2025 reset of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023, the free-speech complaints scheme administered by the Office for Students (OfS) has finally been launched.
For the first time, current and former university staff, applicants for academic posts, visiting speakers and other eligible complainants whose lawful speech is restricted will have access to a specialist sector regulator with meaningful powers of redress, including the ability to recommend the restoration of an invitation to speak, reinstatement of a research programme, changes to university policies and financial payments to complainants.
Upstream of those remedies, complainants will now be able to ask the OfS to determine whether they have suffered adverse consequences because of action or inaction by a university or college that is alleged to breach its statutory duty to secure “freedom of speech within the law”. For academic staff, that duty includes securing academic freedom.
In practical terms, this means that senior leaders wishing for a quiet life, HR business partners with little if any legal training, and EDI officers inclined to regard their job as a form of activism will no longer be quite so free to launder speech-restrictive policies, training programmes and curriculum interventions through the language of “inevitable” equality-law compliance. Such decisions will now be made in the knowledge that the reasoning behind them may one day be placed before a specialist regulator.
One thing those outside the sector often miss is just how difficult universities have historically been to challenge when academic freedom and free speech are curtailed within a culture generated by precisely this sort of reasoning – a culture in which “balancing” means not some grand, Strasbourg-style, case-law-driven analysis of competing rights, but simply that someone on campus feels “a bit upset”, prompting Gemma or Josh from HR to launch a disciplinary investigation because, like, being a bit mean is, to be fair, just not very kind?
Where such cases end in dismissal, an employment tribunal claim can be costly, lengthy and emotionally draining, while the structure of the Equality Act 2010 means that not every interference with academic freedom can readily be translated into a claim of discrimination, harassment or victimisation.
But as CAF knows from its casework, the problem extends far below the threshold at which cases are likely to reach litigation: political litmus tests in recruitment and promotion, for instance, or top-down interventions into teaching and curriculum design, research-funding priorities shaped by ideological fashion, stridently partisan interventions on controversial questions by institutional leaders, the embedding of contested theoretical and ideological claims in quality assurance and compliance documentation, and so on.
The result is that a great deal of institutional pressure on lawful speech has historically fallen between the cracks: serious enough to chill academic life, hamper career development and stigmatise those deemed to be exhibiting the verbal and cognitive symptoms of Wrongthink… but not always easy to translate into a conventional legal claim.
It is precisely across this spectrum – from disciplinary action over lawful speech to those quieter forms of institutional pressure that rarely reach a courtroom – that the new specialist complaints scheme could prove important, not only in securing redress for individual complainants, but in establishing clearer regulatory standards across the sector and bringing to an end the era in which senior administrators could mark their own homework in an atmosphere of backslapping bonhomie.
What shouldn’t be forgotten, however, is that an OfS complaint begins long before it reaches the regulator. Where an internal disciplinary, grievance, complaints or appeals process is capable of considering the issues, the OfS will normally accept a complaint only once that process has been completed or 90 days have elapsed since it began.
By then, months of correspondence, meetings, investigations or appeals may already have taken place. And the OfS rules themselves make clarity and consistency important: it may dismiss as frivolous or vexatious a complaint that “does not clearly identify issues or matters that are the subject of the complaint”, or where the complainant “continually change[s] the substance” of it.
So getting advice early matters. If what is really an academic-freedom case is initially pursued only as a complaint about procedural unfairness, victimisation or contractual rights, it may be much harder months later to reconstruct the case that should have been put to the university in the first place.
That is why CAF has spent the run-up to the new scheme making sure we are ready to help with that upstream work – and, wherever possible, to intervene successfully before recourse to the new scheme is ever needed. The aim is to ensure that meritorious complaints are not lost at any stage of the process, from internal disciplinary and grievance procedures through to the OfS, simply because the underlying free-speech or academic-freedom issue was never clearly identified, properly evidenced or framed against the relevant legal and regulatory tests.
As part of that work, we have launched a new Casework Support page bringing together three resources.
Our practical guide, The new OfS free-speech complaints scheme: getting your complaint right, explains when a case really begins, why the internal stages matter and how CAF can help.
Our interactive eligibility tool takes you through no more than nine questions about your circumstances and the main threshold issues, explains why each question matters, and gives you an initial indication of whether the OfS scheme may apply, any issues to consider, and when it may be worth contacting CAF.
And for those who want to understand the law beneath the scheme, our legal guide explains the statutory duties, the OfS’s regulatory framework and the role of Article 10.
But of course you don’t need to have started – or even decided to make – an OfS complaint before getting in touch. CAF can help identify the legal and regulatory issues, draft correspondence, support academics through grievances, disciplinary proceedings and appeals and, in appropriate cases, fund specialist legal advice and instruct solicitors.
So if you think your freedom of speech or academic freedom is being restricted, come to us early – either by clicking the link below or emailing manager@afcomm.org.uk
And if you don’t need our help yourself, please do spread the word. There will be academics across the country who do not yet know that the landscape changed today, including some working at institutions where news of the new complaints scheme may not, to put it as politely as possible, be accorded quite the degree of proactive institutional visibility it warrants.
Retweet this article. Share our Casework Support page and eligibility checker. Make sure people in your networks know that the new route exists – and that CAF is ready to help them use it.
As the OfS Director for Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom, Arif Ahmed, put it at our conference last year: “Very little could be more conducive to academic freedom than an environment in which it is both true and appreciated by decision-makers that standing up for academic freedom is the path of least resistance. But making that so is up to you.”