A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

Supporting student learning
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Universities are now required to make provisions to remove the barriers which prevent
students with disabilities from having an equal opportunity to succeed on their courses.
The Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001 places duties on the bodies
responsible for providing post-16 education and related services. These duties are:
• not to treat disabled people and students less favourably, without justification, than
students without a disability;
• to take reasonable steps to enable disabled people and students to have full access to
further and higher education.
In addition, the legislative duty (Disability Discrimination Act 2005) requires educational
providers to be proactive in not discriminating against disabled people, which means we
cannot wait until a disabled person applies to do a course, or tries to use a service, before
thinking about what reasonable adjustments can be made.
Students with disabilities are under-represented in higher education. The reasons for
this may be to do with underachievement and low aspiration as children at school, but
may have as much to do with their social class, or their ethnicity or a combination of these
factors. But we cannot rule out the possibility that prejudice against disabled students and
ignorance about what they are capable of, with appropriate support, has also contributed
to their under-representation.
Embedding disability provision is largely a matter of establishing a culture which
values equality and diversity and integrates thinking about disabilities into standard
procedures and thinking by all staff. Variation in support available to students persists
and there continues to be a lack of awareness by staff of the special needs of certain
students. There is still a stigma attached to some illnesses and disabilities – to forms of
mental illness, HIV and even to dyslexia. The result is that students are sometimes
reluctant to reveal their disability or have anxieties about who knows about it. However,
in recent years the number of learners not disclosing any information about disability to
their institution has decreased significantly. Colleges and universities have also improved
methods for gathering data and nowadays provide several opportunities to disclose
information (Action on Access, 2007).
Taking a proactive approach to disability support means continually anticipating the
requirements of disabled people or students and the adjustments that could be made for
them. Regular staff development and reviews of practice are an important aspect of this
(DfES, 2002). All publicity and information about courses must be made available in
alternative formats, provision must be made to ensure accessibility to university facilities
if at all possible and adaptations, such as hearing loops, be provided in teaching rooms.
The Disabled Students Allowance is available in the UK to pay for study support – for
example, equipment, tutorial support, personal helpers, scribes or whatever is
determined to be necessary through the process of ‘assessment of needs’ and the
subsequent personal learning plan.
Advice and guidance for disabled students will normally be provided through a
university service which would normally offer the following: