When Resilience Becomes Real: Moving Beyond Campus Safety Policy
Why Martyn’s Law Sits Within a Wider Duty of Care
Those working in higher education understand, perhaps better than most, how complex it is to keep a campus community safe. Universities are not buildings, they are living, breathing environments where thousands of people study, work, live and socialise, often around the clock. The responsibility that comes with that is significant, and the teams carrying it are frequently doing so with stretched resources, competing priorities and an ever-evolving risk landscape.
It’s against this backdrop that the regulatory landscape is shifting. The proposed Protect Duty (Martyn’s Law) is not the only development on the horizon, but it is one that will bring a sharper focus to safety planning for venues and spaces that the public use. Rather than viewing this as yet another compliance requirement, there’s a real opportunity for universities to use it as a catalyst for thinking more holistically about how they look after the people in their care.
A Landscape of Interconnected Duties
None of this is new to those working in higher education. Universities have long navigated a complex web of legislative duties; from the Prevent Duty and safeguarding obligations to health and safety law, fire safety regulation, equality legislation and data protection. Add the Building Safety Act and an increasingly expectant regulator, and the picture is of a sector asked to do more and more, often without a corresponding increase in capacity or resource.
Martyn’s Law adds a further layer to this. It focuses specifically on public protection at venues and events, and most university campuses, with their open spaces, public-facing facilities and large gatherings, will fall within scope. The core message it reinforces is one that experienced safety and security professionals in Higher Education already understand: knowing what is happening on your campus, having clear plans, and being able to act quickly and coherently, matters.
Resilience Requires More Than Policy
Most universities have well-developed policies. What many find harder, particularly as teams are stretched and campuses grow more complex, is achieving operational coherence. The ability to see what is happening across campus, to communicate clearly, and to coordinate action when something unfolds. Especially in institutions where security teams, estates, student services, communications and senior leadership each play a role, the challenge is often not what to do, but how to do it together, quickly.
Real incidents do not arrive neatly labelled. On any given day, a campus security team might be managing a protest, responding to a welfare concern, dealing with a suspicious package and fielding calls about a broken CCTV camera – all at once. The question universities are increasingly asking is not whether they have a plan, but whether they have the tools and processes to apply that plan consistently, across the full range of situations they face.
This is where resilience becomes practical rather than theoretical.
What Connected, Integrated Approaches Can Offer
One of the consistent challenges we hear from higher education teams is fragmentation, different systems for different problems, no single view of what is happening, and too much reliance on informal communication when things get busy. For Martyn’s Law compliance and for effective campus safety more broadly, institutions benefit most from an approach that brings together situational awareness, incident management and communication in one governed place, rather than managing them as separate workstreams. This is where purpose-built platforms, like Zinc, can genuinely make a difference in higher education settings.
In practice, what that looks like across a university campus includes:
- Mass communications – in a major incident, the ability to reach students, staff and stakeholders quickly and consistently is critical. Delayed or inconsistent messaging creates confusion and compounds harm. Having a reliable, tested communications channel as part of the everyday operating model (not just reserved for emergencies) means institutions are genuinely prepared rather than scrambling.
- Incident management – a single, consistent environment to log, manage and escalate all incidents, from the routine to the critical. This matters both operationally and for governance: when incidents are recorded and managed in the same place, patterns become visible, accountability is clear, and audit trails exist if they are ever needed.
- Intelligence and situational awareness – giving decision-makers a real-time picture of what is happening across campus as situations develop. Understanding the context of an incident early, who is involved, where it is occurring, and what other activity is nearby shapes the quality of the response. For institutions managing large, complex estates, this kind of joined-up visibility can be genuinely difficult to achieve without the right tools in place.
- Student protection – supporting safeguarding, welfare responses and coordinated intervention where individuals may be at risk. This is an area where higher education institutions carry a particularly significant duty of care, and where the connection between safety infrastructure and pastoral responsibility is most direct.
What matters is that these capabilities work together, not in isolation. The most effective approaches treat safety not as a collection of separate workstreams, but as a connected operating model – one that spans the everyday and the exceptional, and that enables teams to respond consistently regardless of what they are facing.
Prevention as a Foundation of Care
For many university safety and security teams, the pressure is felt most acutely not during major incidents, but in the day-to-day work of trying to demonstrate that campus risk is actively managed. Inspections, audits, documented checks, these are not bureaucratic exercises; they are the evidence base that shows an institution is taking its responsibilities seriously, and that builds the confidence of leadership, regulators and the community alike.
The challenge is that for many teams this activity is still managed through spreadsheets, email trails or paper-based records, which makes it difficult to surface patterns, demonstrate compliance or give senior leaders a clear picture of where risks exist. Platforms that support preventative and assurance activity in a structured, auditable way address a real and practical gap. This includes:
- Structured audits and risk assessments
- Documented checks, patrols and inspections
- Oversight of compliance activity across estates, security and operational teams
Done well, these capabilities help universities move from a position of reacting and recording after the fact to one of active, evidenced risk management, something that aligns well with the expectations underpinning Martyn’s Law and wider regulatory frameworks, and that genuinely reflects what good practice looks like.
Supporting Good Judgement at Scale
At its core, building resilience in higher education is about enabling people to make better decisions under pressure, and doing so across a diverse, complex community where the stakes can be genuinely high. When information, communication and response capability sit in a single, trusted environment, teams spend less time chasing updates or reconciling records and more time focused on what matters.
For leadership teams, this translates into something genuinely valuable: the confidence that comes from knowing risks are understood, that incidents are being handled consistently across the institution, and that there is an evidence trail if it is ever needed. That kind of confidence is hard to manufacture through policy documents alone; it comes from having the right operational foundations in place.
A Leadership Opportunity, Not Just a Legal Requirement
Martyn’s Law is, in many ways, a codification of things that experienced higher education safety professionals already know. Safety, preparedness and duty of care have never really been the sole preserve of specialist teams; they flow through every part of how a university operates, from estates management to student services to senior governance. What the legislation does is make those responsibilities more explicit and, ultimately, more accountable.
Universities that approach this thoughtfully, building the operational and governance infrastructure to back up their policies, will be in a stronger position not just to meet regulatory requirements, but to fulfil the deeper purpose of a university: creating an environment where people can genuinely thrive, knowing that their institution has their safety and wellbeing at heart.
That is a shift in mindset as much as infrastructure. And for institutions already working hard to do right by their communities, it is less a burden than an opportunity, to demonstrate, concretely, that they are ready, responsible, and genuinely committed to the people in their care.
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