Universities are among the busiest and most varied event environments in the country. Over the course of a single year, a campus might host club nights and live music, graduation ceremonies, open days, sports fixtures, conferences, weddings, corporate hospitality, festivals, and public lectures. Few commercial venues handle a programme that diverse. Fewer still do it with the particular staffing model that universities rely on: a mix of experienced professionals, early-career staff, students, and volunteers, often working side by side on the same event. That combination makes formal health and safety training not a nice-to-have for university events teams, but a genuine operational necessity. Here’s why.
1. The risk sits across the whole organisation, not in one team
One of the challenges universities face is that event safety responsibility is distributed across several functions that do not always see themselves as part of the same picture.
The estates and operations team is responsible for the buildings, grounds, and infrastructure that events take place in. The events team plans and delivers the programme. The students’ union runs its own calendar of activities, frequently staffed by students and volunteers. Conference and hospitality teams handle external bookings. Somewhere across all of this sits a health and safety function trying to maintain oversight of an enormous and constantly shifting range of activity.
Each of these teams carries a different piece of the risk, and each tends to focus on its own part of it. Estates think about the fabric of the venue. Events think about delivery. The students’ union thinks about the student experience. The problem is that events do not respect these boundaries. A club night in a venue managed by estates, programmed by the events team, staffed partly by student volunteers, with an external security contractor on the door, involves every one of those functions at once, and safety failures tend to happen precisely in the gaps between them.
Formal training gives everyone across these functions a shared framework and a common language. When the estates manager, the events coordinator, and the students’ union officer have all been trained in the same approach to risk, they are far better placed to work together rather than each managing their own corner in isolation.
2. Inexperience is built into the model
In most industries, the people running events have chosen events as a career and accumulated years of experience doing it. On a university campus, that is often not the case.
A significant amount of event activity on campus is delivered by students and volunteers, people who may be enthusiastic and capable but who have little or no formal experience of managing risk at a live event. These are people being placed in positions of real responsibility without necessarily having the training to match.
It is a structural feature of how universities operate, and it is precisely why formal training matters so much in this sector. When the people on the ground are inexperienced, the frameworks and the training behind them have to do more of the work. A well-trained core team who understands how to assess risk, brief a crew, and respond to an incident can hold an event together even when many of the hands on the day are relatively green.
There is also the matter of team turnover. Students graduate, volunteers move on, which means the knowledge that lives in people’s heads can quite quickly walk out of the door every summer. Formal, structured training creates institutional knowledge that can be delivered again to each new intake, maintaining a consistent standard year after year.
3. Campus environments carry their own specific risks
University events also happen in an environment with particular characteristics that increase the safety burden.
Campuses are high-traffic environments with a resident population: students living on site, staff working across the grounds, members of the public passing through. An event does not happen in isolation from the rest of campus life the way a standalone festival does on a greenfield site. Egress from an event has to account for the wider movement of people around the campus. Noise, crowds, and road closures affect residents and neighbours. The interaction between an event and its surroundings is more complex than at a purpose-built venue.
Then there is the programme itself. Late-night events involving alcohol carry a well-understood set of risks around crowd behaviour, medical incidents, and safe dispersal. Large ceremonial events like graduations involve significant crowds, often including elderly and less mobile attendees, in venues that were not necessarily designed for the numbers. Conferences and corporate hospitality bring external contractors onto campus. Each event type carries a different risk profile, and a team responsible for all of them needs to be equipped to recognise and manage that variety.
4. The legal responsibility is real, and it sits with the institution
It is worth being clear about the legal position, because it is sometimes underestimated in a university setting where events can feel like an extension of everyday campus activity rather than a distinct undertaking.
The same health and safety law that applies to a commercial event applies to a university one. The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 places duties on the institution as an employer and as the party in control of premises, extending to the safety of students, volunteers, contractors, and the visiting public. The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 require competent people to be in place and risks to be properly assessed. Where events involve temporary structures, CDM 2015 may apply.
Responsibility for meeting these duties ultimately sits with the institution and the senior people accountable for its operations, which is exactly why investing in the competence of the people delivering events is part of discharging a legal duty. When something goes wrong, the question asked will be whether the institution took reasonable steps to ensure they were competent to do the job safely.
Training is how you close the gap
The case for formal training in this sector comes down to a simple observation. University events teams face more variety, more inexperience, more distributed responsibility, and more environmental complexity than almost any other kind of event operation. The way you manage that is by making sure the people involved have a genuine, shared understanding of how to keep events safe.
That is what a qualification like IOSH Managing Safely in Events provides. It gives teams a structured framework for assessing and controlling risk, an understanding of their legal responsibilities, and a shared language for working together across functions. Crucially, the events-specific version of the course is built around the realities of live events – crowds, temporary structures, adverse weather, contractor management – rather than generic workplace scenarios that bear little resemblance to what a university events team actually deals with.
Delivering that training in-house has particular advantages for a university. It brings a whole team through the same framework at the same time, across estates, events, the students’ union, and hospitality, so that everyone is working from a shared understanding. It can be scheduled around the academic calendar and repeated for new intakes as people move through the institution, and can be tailored to reflect the specific event environment of your campus.
Making the case internally
If you are responsible for events, estates, operations, or health and safety at a university and you recognise the picture painted here, the value of formal training is not abstract. It is about reducing the real risk that sits across your event programme, building institutional resilience against constant staff turnover, and demonstrating that your institution takes its legal responsibilities seriously.
Acumen Safety delivers IOSH Managing Safely in Events as an in-house course for organisations, including university events teams, and can tailor delivery to reflect the specific range of events your campus hosts. If you would like to talk about training your team, get in touch here.
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