Headlines
The Future's Brighter For All Students
14th April 2008
At Worcester University’s Careers Convention, held this year in March, all the universities and many colleges, as well as Connexions, have stalls promoting their institutions.
Every year College provides an opportunity for first-year students to attend. For many it is their first encounter with universities.
Invariably members of the College’s Learning Support Department attend the Convention and these visits are highly valuable as the department gleans key practical information about the help universities are able to offer our students with disabilities.
In recent years the emphasis on disability has shifted away from personal inadequacy or abnormality to looking at environmental and attitudinal barriers experienced by a person with impairment. These barriers are viewed as disabling the person and are external to the individual. This viewpoint shifts the focus onto the rights of disabled people and the requirement for society to change. Under the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA), colleges and universities are required by law not to treat disabled students less favourably for a reason related to their disability and to provide reasonable adjustments for disabled learners. Such adjustments can mean anything from wheelchair access, to signing for deaf students, to note-takers or extra time for dyslexic students.
In the “bad old days” we would go to these Conventions and tentatively ask the university representatives if there was support for our dyslexic students. Often we would be told, particularly by the “red brick” universities, that “dyslexic students wouldn’t be on the courses in the first place”. That was shocking to us because we simply knew it wasn’t true – some of our most able students are dyslexic and attend the top universities.
The new universities (the old polytechnics) were much more enlightened. They always seemed to embrace our questions, indicating enthusiastically that support was available. Such universities have been particularly successful in carrying out the Government’s policy of “widening participation” for all students who previously would not have not attended university. This can be for many reasons: ethnic background, first generation to attend university and, of course, disability.
This year there was a notable and marked change in the attitude of the representatives to the question of provision for disabilities. Representatives of the more traditional universities were open and well informed of the arrangements in their universities for students with disabilities. This is a great leap forward. However, despite the university representatives’ heightened awareness of disability issues, it is sometimes difficult to see which of them are providing the best service. There is no quality assurance or benchmark to demonstrate what support services are being offered. Neither are there any league tables, such as those in The Times or The Guardian (though it could be speculated that student satisfaction surveys will draw on responses from some students with disabilities). We have little quantitative or qualitative research on how effective these universities are in supporting students with disabilities.
At the 2008 Career Convention, there were two aspects of university life for students with disabilities about which I wanted to find out more. I felt these would be good measures of how fast procedures are evolving.
Firstly I was interested in wheel-chair access. One university told me that their buildings were listed and there was no access (so how on earth does Stephen Hawkins cope in Cambridge?).
Secondly, I wanted to know how easy it would be for dyslexic students, who find note-taking hard, to get notes from the University intranet site before or after lectures. The newer universities, e.g. University of Bath Spa have a system called “Blackboard” where tutors post all their notes. The traditional universities, however, talked about the availability of notes before or after a lecture being “hit and miss”.
This is not to say that all of the more traditional universities are weak in their provision of support. We have heard of some, for example Queen Mary College, London, that are very pro-active and are making real strides, particularly with their technology. All we really have to base our research on is visits like this alongside information from our past students. With all of this we are hopeful that, with the implementation of the DDA, many students who would not previously have applied to University, are now applying; and that sincere and successful policies will mean that their needs are being genuinely addressed.
The future for students with disabilities continues to look brighter.