Policy flaws in the UK HE system of support for disabled students

All policies are flawed as they are the result of political processes when they are created and are interpretable by staff at street level when actual implementation occurs. More often than not they reflect disagreements between different sides of the political establishment and are in part written with many stakeholders’ opinions in mind. Incrementalism is the usual result, as the ideas of politicians come to fruition within legislation: policies take shape over several years and through several iterations. Such is the case with policy within the UK HE sector around disabled learners – the result of several policy strands, developed over the last few decades, which together form the policy context.

At the moment, the discourse from within the Department for Education, as a result of fiscal tightening, is around how HEPs should move to more inclusive approaches. However, we didn’t get to this point in the policy process by starting with inclusive approaches in mind, so we are left with policy legacy which wasn’t intended for the current purposes. So here are some thoughts about how the current policies are flawed – they’re not intended as a definitive list, but rather as points for discussion and further contestation.

It relies on the Equality Act 2010 to drive practice

However, legislation such as the EA2010 in itself relies on individuals taking big organisations such as universities to court. Even with the support of quangos such as the EHRC few students are likely to want to go through the convoluted and possibly very expensive legal process this requires. Students don’t want to be at war with the university in an individual capacity as they believe it puts their degree classification on the line and are worried about retribution. Even when a student does take an HEI to court (and anecdotally this is increasing as students who are discriminated against seek financial compensation against high fees through litigation cases) the case is more often than not settled out of court since the institution does not want to be dragged through the press. This means that once battle lines are drawn the university becomes overly defensive as it seeks to mitigate any financial loss or admittance of wrong doing. HEPs would rather settle out of court and this leads to entrenched views rather than positive organisational changes. In worse-case scenarios it can lead to hidden resentment from staff.

No teeth to legislation

A corollary of the above is that most staff don’t take the threat of legal action seriously. Few people have been involved in a legal case or even heard of a colleague who has been dragged into one, so the legal ‘stick’ fails to provoke action. Whilst guidance from organisations such as the EHRC is more proactive and aligned with the social model of disability, which seeks to remove barriers to participation, it is fundamentally underpinned by a legislative/legal model.

Medical model definitions

The Equality Act 2010 relies on medical model definitions. The legislation defines disabled people in terms of their impairment. This can cause issues in legal cases since a significant number (particularly around employment) get thrown out of court because impairment can’t be proven. And it weakens discourse from organisations such as the EHRC when they allude to the social model of disability.

Medical model thinking

The HE sector relies on the medical model of disability. UCAS and HESA, who collect information on disabled students/applicants, use a system which is based on impairment categories. This weakens any discourse from organisations such as HEFCE (now OfS) when they suggest to HEPs that they should move towards inclusive teaching and learning based on social model arguments.

Funding is based on medical categorisation

Institutional funding relies on medical definitions of disability categorised as above. The OfS disburses monies based on disclosure against a list of impairments. However, funding bodies should move towards a funding model based on resource management. If HEPs are providing xx number of hours of note taking for disabled students, they should be recompensed for it.

Statistical information is patchy

OfS/HESA figures are flawed in several ways. They are only proxies of demand. For example, the numbers of students disclosing dyslexia (SpLD) is about 50% of the overall intake of disabled students but it is still rare for a student to possess a fully recognised education psychologist’s diagnosis for the SpLD when they enrol for HE study. Each year about 1/6th to ¼ of the those students who declare an SpLD are being re-assessed because their diagnosis is inaccurate. Similarly, about another 1/6th of these students are newly diagnosed i.e. didn’t know they had SpLD until they entered HE. There is no accurate understanding of how many of these disclosures are never validated through diagnosis. This is also increasingly the case with students who declare a mental health difficulty. No one has provided an accurate understanding of what these, rapidly rising, disclosures actually mean.

The funding model is based on an individualised/medical model/semi market (a mish mash approach)

Some monies go directly to the institution but there is very little monitoring of how these monies are used. The monies are not ringfenced, and never have been, but come through the main grant received as part of WP funds. This approach is more aligned to a social model of disability since the institution can, or at least should divert attention, resources and spending to remove barriers to access and to ensure that the HEP is inclusive. However, support is still largely funded through DSAs which are underpinned by an individualised and medical model approach.

Disjointed approach to defining how support should proceed

There is very little joined up strategy between the DSA process and the realities of street level implementation of teaching practice. Unlike the schools’ sector in which disability staff/teaching staff are part of the process of creating a report on learners’ support, the HE sector in the UK, relies on external staff who usually have not had any HE teaching experience, to write a report based on a limited number of recommendations. These reports are written in order to draw down funding from DSA and are very rarely, if ever, reviewed as the learner progresses through their studies. However, the reports are often circulated to teaching staff with the understanding that they implement the recommendations for adaptations to their teaching practice. HEPs then repeat similar exercises to produce learning support plans which are more context specific but which in turn, rarely involve academic staff who are left to implement recommendations without much input into their rationale.

Free journal article available to download – while stocks last!

It seems I never publicised the availability of free download access to this article:

Mike Wray & Ann-Marie Houghton (2018) Implementing disability policy in teaching and learning contexts – shop floor constructivism or street level bureaucracy? Teaching in Higher Education. 

Only 50 free downloads are available so you’ll have to act quick.

 

 

Pioneering disability rights activist Michael Oliver dies

Just heard the sad news that Professor Michael Oliver has died. Oliver was the first person to articulate the social model of disability which underpins much of the approach to removing discrimination in the UK and its influence can be felt around the world in legislation which promotes the rights of disabled people. You can read about his philosophy in the Politics of Disablement and Understanding Disability: from theory to practice. This model is the reason why I refer to disabled people rather than people with disabilities: you can get a brief flavour of it in the DEMOS training materials I wrote many moons ago. If you don’t know who he is there is an interesting video about his life in higher education made by the University of Kent.

Have you achieved minimum inclusive teaching and learning standards in your organisation?

At the moment many institutions are working on defining what approach should be taken to inclusive teaching and learning and in doing so are benchmarking their existing practice. It’s more difficult to get started with this than you’d imagine because there are no agreed ways of working in HE which are considered to be standard. In schools differentiation and some kind of agreed learning plan* are fairly standard but this is not the case in UK HE organisations.

One of the problems you might encounter when embarking on this work is that the terms used to describe such exercises seem to have become mixed up. The terms base-level, baseline and benchmark seem to be used interchangeably so it’s worth considering what you mean by these ideas.

Benchmarking

Benchmarking is normally about comparing something to an existing standard or practice. You might benchmark how a department is responding to supporting disabled students by comparing what goes on in another department which is seen as being particularly successful in this regard. In businesses this is often done to compare performance against other companies who are more successful, to identify areas for improvement. In terms of inclusive teaching and learning we would be looking at practices which are seen as exemplary, such as ensuring that the majority of the materials you are going to use in a lecture are available for students to peruse 24-48 hours in advance. Or ensuring that your handouts are as accessible as possible – making sure that the print is legible using a recommended font type and size (such as those without serifs printed in at least 12 pt).

Base-level provision

Where we seem to have got confused in HE inclusion circles (in the UK at least) is with notions of base level support. This is probably because of the 1994 base-level document which was commissioned by HEFCE and HEFCW. If you’re not familiar with this publication I would recommend that you have a look at it because it really did pave the way for a lot of provision in the UK: some of the suggestions are still not implemented in some HEPs 25 years later.

The foreward to this document is confusing to say the least: it says that they were intending to set out minimum standards and by doing that to set a benchmark for comparison. Perhaps the benchmark was very low at the time but the recommendations contained within are quite radical, even now.

The executive summary doesn’t really help to elucidate matters: it says that the provision outlined refers to the ‘minimum level of support that each HEI should provide.’ It then says that these provisions were not intended as statements of best practice because it was perceived that they could be improved on.

Well they were right about being able to use them as a benchmark against which to compare your practice at the time but would you want to benchmark against minimum standards? There is a possibility these confusions were being used as rhetorical devices as is often seen in policy documents: policies are interpretable in multiple ways. If you’re giving the benefit of the doubt to the policy writers they are intended so that localised implementation is afforded flexibility – the cynical amongst you would see them as a lack of understanding of a policy context.

Baseline

Somewhere along the journey base level seems to have got mixed up with baseline. Which is an exercise which many HEPs in the UK are engaged in currently. They are measuring the practice within academic departments to gain some kind of baseline measure of their provision so that they can show progress. The inclusive teaching, learning and assessment tool contained within these pages is an example of how you might go about that. With it I tried to create an iterative process because I was cautious of creating an exercise which is seen as imposing standards from on high (top down implementation). I also wanted to create some sort of continuous improvement process so that departments had room to develop provision and had ways in which to define their own subject specific good practice. Another way of doing this is to outline benchmarks which exist in the sector (they can be from across education) and ask departments to measure their own performance against these. In this way you are offering best practice which academic departments can aspire to.

Here’s some suggestions (with additional questions from me and from within the detail of the document) from the original base-level guidance which you could benchmark against.

Do you have a well-publicised system of outlining students’ learning support needs with target times for completion and a code of practice which outlines how these are circulated? How are these used by academic departments? Do all academic staff see them? Do they input into them?

Does your HEI provide services to reflect the agreed needs within these documents? Do learning support plans get implemented? Do they reflect existing academic practice? Are they reviewed sufficiently?

Is a member of senior management given an assigned role in the implementation of inclusive provision? Do they have a role in dealing with unresolved issues that might affect the organisation of academic provision?

The guidance is perhaps most famous (can policy guidance be famous?) within the UK HE sector for outlining ‘minimum’ levels of staffing. Does your institution provide the following dedicated disability officer staffing levels?

Size of institution (students) Full time equivalent posts
Up to 3,000 0.5
5,000 1.0
10,000 2.0
15,000 3.0
20,000 4.0

* I make a distinction here with learning contracts which are prevalent in HE because they are usually a static statement of support needs rather than a reviewable document which tracks progress against learning targets.  Also, teaching staff very rarely have any input into them, unlike learning plans in schools.

 

Disabled Students’ Allowances effectiveness research

Short post on this one for now as I’m working away in Hong Kong. The Department for Education have just published commissioned research into disabled students’ take up and thoughts about Disabled Students’ Allowances.

You can download the report directly here or go to the related DfE website.

First comment is that I’m not sure they are measuring effectiveness, as the outcome measures are not directly related to that. They asked students how confident they felt about completing their course. That section of the report should really have been entitled ‘does DSA have an effect on how confident students feel about completing their course?’ not ‘Do DSAs and HEPs support have an impact on student retention and achievement?’  The only way of providing any objective evidence on retention and achievement is to look at outcome measures such as completion rates compared to non-disabled students and by comparing those who did claim the monies and use the support with those that didn’t (in terms of completion rates not of feelings about their completion likelihood). Also they have examined whether it has influenced the decision to attend HE but not used a comparison group of people who haven’t attended HE.

At first glance it seems somewhat flawed in terms of measuring what the headline title of the DfE webpage is but it could be the jetlag so I’ll give it another go and read it again when I’m less sleep deprived.

 

We are the university – local actors’ roles in policy implementation

I am always fascinated by discussion in HE around the notion of ‘the university’. When engaging in conversations on the subject of policy, there is usually some mention of how ‘the university’ controls aspects of the behaviour of people who work in those organisations. It is intriguing to consider how staff deal with a whole bricolage of policy devices which impinge into the workplace and therefore the classroom. I wonder if increasingly staff feel a sense of this because of the managerialist culture which is embedded within most government education policy.

Whilst policies and discourse around the commodification of education represent structural features of the context of teaching these are juxtaposed with attempts by teaching staff to maintain a sense of agency. Trowler, Saunders & Knight (2003) talk about back of the stage and under the stage discussions which take place in contrast to front of the stage conversations which occur in more ‘official’ fora. To get to the bottom of what occurs at the chalkface it is important to take into account these more unofficial discussions as they reflect a different understanding of policy implementation. Policy implementation which is underpinned through a top down lens is in danger of failing to understand these processes since it presents a mechanistic view of implementation.

Policy texts are interpreted by local actors, through individual’s interpretations and understandings of what policies mean and more collective understandings or commonly agreed ways of thinking about a policy issue. Policy is vernacularized or given localised meanings. For instance, during my research into how teaching staff implemented equality policies in one HEI I noticed that equality seemed to be equated to access for all, but this also meant not giving an advantage to some over others, which in turn led to misgivings about giving disabled students extra time. There was also consternation about students who were given specialist tuition, who then required adjustments to assessment processes, as this was seen as doubly compensating (doubly unfair to non-disabled students who couldn’t get any of this support). 

Thomson et al (2010) demonstrated the way in which policies (which can be described as under the umbrella of performativity) may be reproduced in ‘vernacularised’ ways by individual teachers through various teaching strategies which actually led to disengagement. The policy was translated into practice which was dependent on individual characteristics of the teachers (such as level of experience, ability to control bad behaviour etc.). Whilst they appeared to be producing the required policy outcomes in terms of government defined statistics, the outcome for the students was a lack of genuine engagement or recognition of individual motivations. For the one student it was reproducing patterns of educational disadvantage which was seen in her parents and close relatives.

Which leads me back to the notion of ‘the university’. Surely, we’re all part of what the university is. To students in particular, the majority of the interactions they have with ‘the university’ are through the teaching sessions they attend and the ways in which these are delivered, is influenced by the ways in which these staff vernacularise policy.  

 

The rise of mental health disclosure in HE – a case for moral panic?

It should be applauded that the minister for HE has cast a spotlight on the provision for a growing numbers of students who are identifying as having mental health difficulties. However, what isn’t clear is why a specific group of disabled students should gain so much ministerial attention and (moral) panic within headlines of major newspapers. I thought a good starting point might be an analysis of the extent of the problem by using freely available statistics from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA).

This table shows the relative increase in disclosure of mental health difficulties (MHD) alongside disclosure of specific learning difficulties (SpLD)(dyslexia etc.), the overall increases in the numbers of students in general and the disclosure of all disabled students. (N.B. these are only first year UK domiciled students as the figures for all students are much harder to obtain from the HESA website – but they are a good enough sample to show the size of the effects).

What is clear is that there is cause for celebration in terms of the sector’s duty to implement the Equality Act 2010. For example, overall there has been almost a five-fold increase in the level of students who were willing to disclose some type of HESA-categorised disability. This is a great achievement for the UK in general as it is more than likely a combination of the increased awareness and acceptance of conditions such as dyslexia, autistic spectrum disorders and MHDs. Students are being diagnosed with these conditions much more frequently and are increasingly willing to tell someone about it.

Going back to the figures, in terms of SpLD there has been a 13-fold increase and for students with MHD an almost 19-fold increase. Maybe this is where the panic has come from? However, a very quick ‘eyeballing’ of the numbers shows that between 1994/95 and 2005/06 disclosure of SpLD increased five-fold which is a similar rate of increase as that which we have seen in the last 8 year period for MHD disclosure. However, there hasn’t been (or rather there wasn’t) a similar level of panic in the sector when the increases in dyslexia were identified. No minister for higher education accused the sector of failing students with SpLD as far as I am aware, although one has recently mentioned the importance of the support he received when he found out he was dyslexic at school. There are still twice as many students in HE with SpLDs than with MHD, but no headlines appearing about their support?

What is encouraging is that most universities are now well staffed to work with students who disclose MHD, often with a significant level of counselling resource and more often than not a multi-disciplinary team under the auspices of wellbeing. These resources have increasingly been bolstered by additional services provided through the NMH element of DSA funding through specialist mentoring provision. HE still seems to be the richer cousin compared to other levels of the education sector when it comes to resourcing support for SEN (a perverse quirk of the education system – fight your way into HE and get good support having contended with the continued post code lottery in schools and colleges). This was not the case for SpLD students in HE in 1994 when these statistics were first collected. There was very little provision for those students 25 years ago. Most universities now provide reasonable adjustments for SpLD students such as extra time for exams and assignments (some HEPs) and extended library loans, as well as utilising the NMH allowances from DSA to pay for specialist tuition. But it would be useful to see a comparison of the resources available for these two groups of students within HEPs.

Something else to think about: I haven’t analysed the figures for all the other categories of disability here, however policy makers ought to consider the statistics in a more holistic fashion before accusing the sector of failing to adequately support one particular group. The picture is much more nuanced that it might first appear. For example, it should be noted that there are only 936 more first year deaf students enrolling in 2016/17 (2080) than there were in 1994/95 (1144). Perhaps, not so surprising when you consider the rates at which deaf students gain 5 A*-C GCSEs. Should we be just as morally panicked? Maybe Sam Gyimah ought to tell Vice-Chancellors that prioritising these students is not negotiable?  Or maybe he should just be concerned about all disabled learners in all levels of the education sector?

Overseeing quality of support for disabled learners in higher education: where next?

If inclusive teaching and learning is to gain traction in UK HE, support for equality needs to be been given more than the cursory glance during quality assurance that it has been afforded in the past.

The QAA is to remain as the agency in the UK that will oversee ‘quality and assessment standards functions’. With a new ‘fully revised’ version of the UK Quality Code due to be published in late 2018 I thought it would be interesting to look back at the role which quality audit has taken in ensuring disabled students get an equitable experience of HE. It’s particularly important at the moment with such an emphasis being placed on inclusive teaching and learning and a move away from the DSA funded support for individual students.

In October 1999, the QAA published ‘Section 3: students with disabilities’ of its code of practice for quality assurance which audit teams were to use when ‘inspecting’ the provision of HEPs. The section contained 24 precepts which covered a whole range of facilities including precepts related to the delivery of academic programmes and examinations and assessments. An example of this being precept 10:

The delivery of programmes should take into account the needs of disabled people or, where appropriate, be adapted to accommodate their individual requirements. (QAA 1999, p. 13).

In 2005 Riddell and colleagues noted that academic staff were aware of the section of the code which focussed on disabled students and by 2007 observed that the section had been recognised as playing a role in the development of provision within HEIs. But teaching staff also expressed resentment at being told what to do by an external agency and for some, quality assurance processes overall are anathema to their understanding of the essence of HE provision.

A review  carried out by the QAA in 2009 of 129 of its institutional audits is somewhat equivocal in relation to the impact of section 3 of the code (QAA, 2009). Whilst it was reported that 95% of audit documents mentioned disabled students, it also noted that there is no requirement to report separately on support available and therefore there were no references made to this provision in sections within audits reports which related to good practice. Nor were there any recommendations for action made by the auditing teams (QAA, 2009). It is perhaps indicative of the approach taken to support for disabled students within institutional audits that the report mentions ‘only a small number of the institutional audit reports specifically identified features of good practice in the area of meeting the needs of students with disabilities in aspects of learning and teaching’ (QAA, 2009, p9).

My own experience of QAA audits and of other quality assurance processes in HEPs is that disabled student support is given a very cursory glance. Disability staff in HE are often pulled in at the last minute as an afterthought. I’m sure many readers will have experienced taking or making a phone call a week before such a process is due to take place, when the question ‘what are we doing to ensure disabled students are supported properly?’ is asked. This is despite quality assurance relating to equality issues being ignored for the previous 4 or 5 years since the same processes were undertaken.

In 2010, an updated version of the QAA section was published which contained precepts that reflected a more inclusive style and which paid heed to the social model of disability and the need to remove barriers to participation (QAA, 2010). However, in 2013 the specific section on disabled students was removed from the code and replaced with mentions within ‘chapter B4: enabling student development and achievement.’ This new chapter also amalgamated chapter 8 which was related to careers advice. These topics are odd bedfellows. At the same time references to disabled students were included within the chapters which specifically refer to teaching and learning and assessment and prior learning.

Whilst embedding references to disability within the other chapters of the code represents a more inclusive approach the move was perhaps questionable given the evidence from the QAA’s own review of audits. A more prudent approach might have been to ensure compliance to the existing separate section. It’s always a difficult balance to get right – being inclusive by embedding these issues throughout such processes whilst not losing the essence of what you are trying to achieve. In my opinion we went too far at that point in time.

Chapter B4 also pushed HEPs to ensure that they are pursuant of their obligations under existing legislation such as the Equality Act 2010. But there is very little joined up thinking around the EA2010 and the practice of teaching and learning. Once responsibility for this aspect of quality assurance is farmed out in such a way to other agencies or parts of the university which oversee equality policy, it gets lost with the myriad issues which academic departments are dealing with and becomes the bolt-on process which gets left as an afterthought.

If we are to make progress on inclusive teaching and learning during this next phase of quality assurance, it is imperative that it is embedded within the core processes of audit and that auditing teams and subsequent reports put it up front and central.

Identifying dyslexia in higher education: Rose part II

‘there does appear to be a bit of a postcode lottery when it comes to offering support’

I thought I would try to explain the process of identifying specific learning difficulties/differences (SpLD)/dyslexia for readers who do not have an in-depth knowledge of how support systems work in HE in the UK. Many education providers face an uneasy challenge of identifying learners with additional support needs whilst struggling to provide properly funded support mechanisms.

The system that most HEPs have in the UK is that students are directed towards the disability service (or the name given to it in their place of study) to be ‘assessed’. Many students (and often their parents) start asking questions at open days, often stating that their school did some sort of assessment and it was used to give them extra time in exams or they were told they weren’t dyslexic but they’re still struggling. Or they come at some point in the academic year (either during Freshers’ week) or when they start struggling.

The second tranche of students usually come because of a referral from their academic department after they have handed in an essay. By the way, this is a reason not to panic in central services, as a steady stream of students emanating from academic colleagues is a sure sign that the message around available support is getting through.

Most central services staff will then do some sort of screening test which will involve an interview with the student to discuss their educational experiences and the reasons why they think they might be dyslexic and some sort of screening schedule (usually a list of questions with indicators). However, in my experience it is rare to turn a student down at that point: more usually they will show some kind of issue and be referred to an educational psychologist. This will either be someone who comes onto campus from an external organisation (I have used the Educational Guidance Service in the past) or they will be asked to visit a local centre such as those run by the British Dyslexia Association.

The assessment is usually around £300 which is a significant amount of money for students facing years’ of tuition fee repayments once they leave HE. Students must weigh up the costs of paying for this against the benefits of identification and all that comes with it in terms of self-understanding and support systems.

But many HEPs provide some financial support for this process. From a cursory search using Google (and contrasting HEPs towards the opposite ends of the Guardian league tables): at Oxford University support is available through the ‘SpLD fund’ – it appears from the information I could find that the costs will be met in full and up to a year after the assessment was carried out; and at York St John University it appears that the student must pay the full costs of the assessment (£284) and arrange their own appointment. (Please let me know if the information is incorrect for either of these examples).

So there does appear to be a bit of a postcode lottery when it comes to offering support and there is a question over the extent to which staff within HEPs act as street level bureaucrats when developing systems of support in the face of unlimited demands for their services. At the most inclusive end of the spectrum, are HEPs in which a screening is offered across all students. In some further education colleges for instance, an initial literacy test is administered to all students upon enrolment on a course of study which might funnel students to support for English language skills including support for SpLD. The opposite to this would be a provider where there is no financial support or limited referral processes.

When I first came into HE 20 years ago, there were limited resources in the UK and the institution I worked at offered limited help with the referral process. A fund was available, but it was means-tested, and the student was asked to go off campus to a centre and arrange their own assessment. It wouldn’t have been in my best interests in terms of student expectations if I’d screened everyone, because there weren’t the resources available to support those students. They were troubling times for me, professionally and ideologically!

The current context means that these systems are once again being opened up to funnelling because demands are ever-increasing (disabled student disclosure has risen hugely in the last 30 years), resources are being stretched (in England at least where the funding model is being ‘modernised’), and the model of central support is being questioned in order to move towards more inclusive teaching and learning. Some HEPs are already reducing the amount of funding they provide for assessments of SpLD or are outsourcing their support services to commercial operations. The question is how do HEPs maintain the balance between making support available on a mass basis with limited financial resources whilst ensuring that they abide by their legal obligations and commitment to social justice, widening participation and inclusion.

Tensions in HE disability policy – #1 student choice in DSA provision

Most policies present difficulties for implementation which result in tensions or dilemmas. HE disability policy is no different and this post highlights one such difficulty. The first tension is that there is some kind of student choice built into the system of DSA funding. When I first started in HE nearly 20 years ago there was ‘real’ student choice at least in the university I was working in. Disabled students could choose to organise their own support in a similar way to that which direct payments allowed. This was mainly because we didn’t have the resources nor the infrastructure to take on that responsibility in the disability office. However, it was often repeated to me (mainly by my manager) that the money belonged to the student and therefore they were responsible for using the money as they saw fit (how things have changed). It was a non-means tested grant after all and at the time universal wholesale maintenance grants were still in the memory of most people working in HE.

The reality of course was that this rarely occurred. There was one highly organised student that I was aware of that was hiring and firing her own support workers but I believe she was also doing this for her daily living support arrangements before she had arrived at university. Also, there was very little support in place anywhere so there was no market from which to choose providers.

As I understand it the monies are still supposed to belong to the student. This is part of the reason for continued government rhetoric around student choice in the DSA system.  It was meant to be a system which gave students control over the services which they required.

But what’s the reality? There is no real choice in the provision of DSA. The way that the DSA will be spent is pretty much tied up by the assessment of needs (AoN) report. Whilst there is a quotation system built into the AoN process to ensure value for money, the student is not given a choice of who will supply any elements. The suppliers who are put in the AoN reports are decided upon by the assessment centres and more recently for NMH by the DSA-QAG database. The student is then told by SFE which supplier has been chosen i.e. the cheapest. In theory the student is allowed to swap suppliers but why would they do this? The process of applying for DSA is so complicated that by this stage most students are beyond the point of caring. And if it was really their money they would shop around; but at no stage does a student see the money nor are they given the real role of being a consumer.

Recently, when students have exercised their choice by switching suppliers to in-house provision or university-preferred suppliers, missives have been disseminated by SFE suppressing the practice. As if there is some kind of underhand activity going on. Various bureaucratic barriers have been put in place to stop this happening which makes a mockery of the notion of student choice. The idea being that the market should be left to create its own fairness through the invisible hand – but of course the market is missing an essential element – a ‘real’ customer. So it’s a false market. In one sense the market is working by creating ‘value’ because prices seem to be falling but not because of laissez-faire policies: rather through a much more deterministic two quote system.

Importantly, we shouldn’t forget that students make their choice when they apply for HE study through UCAS. They choose a university based on several criteria including the disability support available. When a student gets books from the library they are not expecting to pay for those services separately. Nor do they get to take their monies and buy their IT services from different places. So why should they be expected to shop around for their disability support? Especially when transition for disabled students is more complicated than for other students and any additional bureaucracy leads to additional barriers to access.