If you want to know the numbers of students who have declared a disability who are enrolled on courses of higher education in the UK you have to look at statistics provided by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (generally known by the acronym HESA (Hee-sah)). HEPs submit these figures to HESA each year as part of statistical returns at key points in the academic year. It’s not easy finding this data on the HESA website as the tables can be accessed through a number of routes so I’ve done it for you.
How do we find out how many disabled students there are?
You can jump directly to the disability statistics by jumping straight into the Personal Characteristics section. OR you can go through the Open Data section . Once you are in the Open Data section, access the Students section then look in the Who’s studying in HE? Followed by Personal Characteristics.
You can play around with various menus on this webpage but at the top level the data tells us that there are 484,270 students who have declared a disability and have given permission for this data to be shared. This represents 16.5% of all HE students (N=2,937,155) who are on all years of study and at all levels (including postgraduate students i.e. PhD/EdD etc). This has jumped up from 13.9% in the space of the 5 years covered. Unfortunately, HESA has only given the data for the last 5 years (2018/19 up to 2022/23) on this webpage, but you can get the data for a longer period of time from the HESA publications archive.
Problems with the data
Beyond the 2018/19
Here is where it starts to get tricky! (Well, you might say it’s been tricky already but…). If you want to go further back than the pages/data discussed so far you must start delving deeper into the HESA website which is no mean feat. To make it easier for you; to find equivalent data/tables going back to the 2016/17 academic year you need to access the ‘Figure 5 – HE student enrolments by personal characteristics 2016/17 to 2020/21’ page (a catchy name!) and also, the data doesn’t match!!! Before that date you have to download the raw data from the publications archive and start to collate some of the information yourself (which I will do in a follow blogpost).
Entrants vs enrolments
Some of the data/tables on the HESA website refer to new entrants (i.e. they are classed as being on their first year of their programme for the academic year referred to – this includes all master’s student for instance added together with first year undergraduates etc. It does not include 2nd year or 3rd year students or postgraduate research students who have completed more than one year of study). However, some of the tables do refer to ALL students (i.e. all years of study): so be aware that this is the case when using the statistics or comparing with your institution.
Rounding issues
For ethical reasons, so that individuals cannot be identified, the figures are rounded up or down to 5 or 0, so they are not absolute.
Disclosure issues
These statistics are based on numbers of students disclosing a disability. Most HEPs in the UK follow the definition of disability enshrined in the Equality Act (2010) (UK legislation) and there will be students who are unable to provide evidence that would define them as disabled under the Act. However, this doesn’t mean that this declaration would be removed from the statistics necessarily.
In a similar vein, as the figures are disclosures to the university there will also be a number of students who are disabled but who do not appear in the statistics because they choose not to disclose or don’t realise that they are disabled when they apply or enrol at their institution. Equally, there may be an issue with false positives (student who misunderstand the question (a small %) or tick it by mistake (an even smaller %).
Usually the number of students declaring a disability increases over the course of the academic year as students realise they might benefit from disclosing, come forward because they might be struggling (as is often the case with students with an undiagnosed SpLD), develop a condition (such as mental health difficulties), or just come forward because they didn’t want to disclose upon application for fear of discrimination.
Relatedly, the data is based on disclosures at key points during the student lifecycle which means that a lot of this data ‘rolls down’ from when the student applied to the institution for instance. Different HEPs have different ways of ensuring the integrity of this data and therefore there will be difference in the accuracy of this data. For example, some HEPs allow students to update their record and to remove this data.
Changes in categorisation
Categories of disability collected by HEPs and collected by HESA have been known to change down the years, so it isn’t that easy to compare across all available data with complete accuracy.
Inclusion in higher education 