Reforms to disabled students’ support ‘will confuse and dilute our rights’

The government is threatening to make sweeping changes to the system of support for disabled students in higher education, which would remove many individual payments and transfer further responsibility onto universities.

The plans would mean that many disabled students would no longer be entitled to funding to pay for vital support but would have to rely on their universities addressing the barriers they face.

The potential reforms are contained in a call for evidence on possible changes to the non-medical help (NMH) part of disabled students’ allowance (DSA), which covers support such as British Sign Language interpreters, specialist mentoring and one-to-one study skills for autistic students.

The reforms would only apply to students eligible to receive student finance through Student Finance England, although this includes students from England who study at universities and other higher education providers in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Mette Anwar-Westander, chief executive of Disabled Students UK (DSUK), said this week that the continuing failure to improve the experiences of disabled university students was “a predictable consequence of a lack of government oversight”.

Research by DSUK last year found that only 35 per cent of disabled students had the support they needed to access their education on equal terms with non-disabled students.

Anwar-Westander said: “While we welcome the interest from the Department for Education in improving non-medical help provision and the acknowledgement that disabled students are not sufficiently supported by the system as it stands, we must warn against any approach that attempts to ‘pass the buck’.”

In 2021-22, £58.5 million was spent on NMH support for undergraduate DSA recipients.

DSA is a non-means-tested grant which helps students with the additional disability-related costs they face in higher education, such as equipment and travel, and is administered by the Student Loans Company, which determines eligibility and approves the support that can be funded.

But the Department for Education (DfE) is now suggesting that, because universities are required to make reasonable adjustments for all disabled students under the Equality Act, it should be their responsibility to provide all NMH support.

Ministers point to a lack of integration between DSA-funded support and the support provided by the student’s university, and they say the administration of NMH “is not working well for some students”, while there are sometimes not enough NMH workers available to support all the students who need that help.

They are also suggesting that there are “significant risks of poor value for money and inefficiencies” within the NMH system.

They even argue that cutting spending on DSA and passing responsibility for addressing barriers to universities would be a more “social model” approach to inequality.

And they say in the call for evidence that there is a “fundamental question as to whether an individual student should have a funding entitlement for more specialist NMH support” or whether it should be a university’s responsibility to provide this support, assisted by DfE funding.

One of the questions DfE asks in its call for evidence is: “How do you think giving [universities] overall responsibility for the whole of a student’s NMH support would affect the provision offered?”

But in the equality impact assessment section of the evidence call, DfE warns of “a risk that students whose [university] does not perform well in supporting them may have worse outcomes than if they had an individual entitlement to more specialist NMH support”.

It also warns that universities with a “significant” number of students with “very high cost NMH support needs” that are greater than the maximum currently available through DSA “could put pressure on [a university’s] budget for other types of NMH support for other students”.

The call for evidence closes on 3 July.

Previous changes to DSA introduced by the Conservative government in the 2016-17 academic year meant that lower levels of NMH support are already no longer covered by DSA and must be provided by universities.

Anwar-Westander said: “The issue with non-medical help provision within the current system is not which body is responsible for it on paper, but the fact that responsible bodies lack accountability.

“We welcome attempts to simplify the administrative process, but only insofar as the body responsible can be held to account.

“As such we look forward to hearing from DfE how they plan to regularly measure whether disabled students have the non-medical help they need and enforce consequences where providers fall short.”

She said last year’s survey of disabled students by DSUK showed they were “similarly insufficiently supported whether they are DSA recipients or not”, despite the reforms introduced in 2016-17, and that “this failure was a predictable consequence of a lack of government oversight”.

She added: “There is currently no body proactively evaluating whether higher education providers are providing disabled students with the support they need.

“As a consequence, it is not uncommon to come across providers with a faulty understanding of their responsibility, as evidenced by the Natasha Abrahart case [and the University of Bristol] and our survey data.”

Bethany Bale, education policy officer for Disability Rights UK, said: “We face disproportionate barriers to accessing higher education and it’s essential that any government proposals reduce this inequality.

“Disabled students already face a postcode lottery when it comes to accessing support at university.

“Examples like the recent case in Bristol highlight the dangerous position that this can leave us in.

“This proposal will only confuse and dilute our rights.

“It’s clear that this proposal does not reflect the needs of disabled people and we urge the government to co-produce effective DSA reform with disabled individuals directly.”

A report in October 2020 by Policy Connect and the Higher Education Commission, co-chaired by Lord [David] Blunkett, said the 2016-17 changes meant the amount of support students with lower-level needs received depended on which university they attended.

Sheffield University Students Union told the commission at the time that the DSA changes had “increased inequality for disabled students across the country as the level of support they receive now depends on the ability or willingness of their institution to fund aspects of their support”.

The commission said many professionals had stated “that some disabled students will always need additional support that cannot be provided solely” by their university.

Picture: Bethany Bale (left) and Mette Anwar-Westander

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