The Importance of Student Voice in the UK Disabled Student Commitment
Introduction
The Disabled Student Commitment - DSC (The Disabled Student Commitment | Advance HE (advance-he.ac.uk)) is a UK voluntary, non-regulatory scheme that allows universities to show the progress they are making supporting disabled students in the areas that matter most. Sign up to the Commitment is an achievable first step in a journey towards an institution-specific action plan. Although the DSC is based on a clear set of principles about what a higher education provider should do, at the same time, underlying it is a commitment to how a university should work, centred on disabled student voices. This is key to achieving the Commitment and to ensuring that it has impact.
This article will set out the background and approach to the DSC, and explains the role the disabled student voice plays.
Background to the Commitment
The Disabled Student Commitment (DSC) is a framework intended to reduce the outcome, experience and progression gaps for disabled students in higher education in the UK. The Commitment encourages shared goal setting, transparency and is adaptable to individual university contexts, including their starting point and available resourcing.
Access for disabled students has continued to improve, with UCAS End of Cycle Figures 2023 showing that a fifth of UK applicants have shared a disability or mental health condition on their application, which is an increase of 34% from 2022. While not underrepresented, there is an awarding gap for disabled students and a wider gap in employment outcomes and experience.
In 2024, UCAS reported that 38% of disabled applicants now defer entry (compared to 23% pre-Covid); and in 2024, the Office of the Independent Adjudicator reported that c.40% of student complainants identified as disabled. The latest report by Disabled Students UK highlights that the majority of disabled students do not share that they have a disability and of those that do, the majority do not have all of their support needs met consistently 2024-Access-Insights-Report.pdf.
As universities become more inclusive in their approach to learning and assessment, a smaller proportion of students should require either reasonable adjustments or specific additional financial support (through Disabled Student Allowance). However, embedding inclusive practice has been uneven both by university and by subject.
In the UK, the recent Abrahart Case and the resulting EHRC note of learning reasserted a series of legal duties that universities already have. Advice note for the higher education sector from the legal case of University of Bristol vs Abrahart | EHRC. Adopting the Commitment will be one way that universities can respond to these duties.
Finally, the UK higher education system has also had some years of clear government direction to improve student mental health. The creation of a University Mental Health Charter (UMHC) has aided this. This UMHC is a voluntary charter mark, and there has been strong government direction for universities to engage with it. While the DSC is not a charter mark, there is clear overlap between the Commitment and the UMHC. Disabled students are generally more likely to report poor mental health resulting from the challenges of navigating HE, while long-term mental health conditions account for an increasing proportion of those sharing a disability. By adopting the DSC, universities can ensure that they make changes that will improve the mental health of disabled students, and will support those with long-run mental health conditions.
Content of the Commitment
The Commitment was established by the Disabled Student Commission in 2023. The Commission was an independent and strategic group established by the Universities Minister in July 2019 with funding from the UK Office for Students. It had a key responsibility to advise, inform and influence higher education providers to improve support for disabled students.
The Commission produced a wide range of guidance and ended its three year term by establishing the Disabled Student Commitment. The Commitment was drawn up based on extensive sector consultation, research on best practice and feedback from disabled students.
The Commitment contains 43 principles, of which most are for higher education providers. The others are for key sector bodies, such as various Government departments, funders, sector agencies, regulators and professional, statutory and regulatory bodies (henceforth referred to as other organisations). The intention is to bring forward changes that not only change the interaction between universities and disabled students, but change the wider environment for applicants, students and graduates.
The principles are divided into five chapters, and these follow the lifecycle of the student from application, induction into the university, on-course experience through to graduate employment. The Commitment first establishes expectations for information sharing and consent. The Commitment then guides the reader through four key touchpoints of the higher education journey.
The Commitment is applicable to all students irrespective of level or mode of study. It aims to be inclusive in respect of language and vocabulary, and to recognise intersectionality and multiple conditions.
Role of student voice in achieving the commitment
There are four key ways in which the student voice is supported by the Disabled Students Commitment. These work at different levels and encourage a set of complementary actions that together aim to bring disabled student’s voices into the centre of discussions at an individual, institutional and sector level. The four levels cover: the achievement of the commitment itself; the experience of an individual student; the way that an institution understands student experience; and finally, in the sector-wide development of the Disabled Student Commitment.
First, the Commitment requires that higher education providers (HEPs) work with their disabled students in order to achieve the Commitment. Achievement of the Commitment occurs when a university has published a delivery plan. The plan must be published annually. The delivery plan comes out of a mapping exercise that must be done in consultation with its disabled students.
The mapping of areas of strength and deficit against the Commitment principles must be done in conjunction with students in order to understand their perceptions. The principles are based on statements about the way that disabled students should experience teaching, learning or services. For example, principle 34 in the Chapter Moving On, states:
Careers and employment guidance acknowledges the barriers that may be experienced by disabled students, and emphasis and consideration are given to the positive attributes and skills that disabled students will have developed during their time at university.
While it is important to ask the relevant service if they have an offering for disabled students and their level of resourcing, understanding if this has been achieved cannot only rest with a discussion with careers and employability staff. It must be completed understanding the views of disabled students themselves. Do various groups of disabled students believe that there is an offering for them? Do they receive appropriate guidance and support?
This kind of joint work is crucial in an era of financial constraint, as it is only by understanding student perceptions that areas of greatest deficit can be understood. With resourcing a concern in many universities, signing up to the Commitment ensures that resources are used effectively to meet the key needs at any institution in a way that is informed by student voice as well as by sector best practice.
Second, as well as prioritising the disabled student voice to make mapping better, the Commitment aims to change the way that universities work with disabled students. It aims to set up partnership working for individual students, with a series of principles around sharing of information about a disability. These are intended to set up an early and positive interaction between the student and relevant staff. There are five principles that govern sharing of information between an individual student and their university, and these intend to make the purpose of sharing clearer, fairer and less burdensome.
Third, the DSC principle 24 states:
HEPs to pursue opportunities that provide insight into the experience of their disabled students, such as membership of Disabled Students’ UK’s Access Insights Project.
This principle aims to change the way that higher education providers understand their disabled student experience across the institution. This is key as although many universities may conduct student experience surveys, often the questions are not focused on the key issues faced by disabled students. For example, the UK National Student Survey (a regulated undergraduate student experience survey) does not contain any questions on the central issue of negotiating a support plan or having it implemented. Principle 24 is key to the provision of regular, university-wide information about the experience of disabled students.
Fourth, the infrastructure behind the Disabled Student Commitment is also informed by the disabled student voice. A Student Advisory Group, of 15 current HE students, has been set up, designed to contain a group of disabled students that can reasonably represent the diverse and intersectional HE community. Their principal remit will be to advise, challenge, and shape discussion taken forward by the Disabled Student Advisory Group.
Conclusion and next steps
The first annual report on progress has been published Disabled Students' Commitment: Year One report | Advance HE.
Significant progress has been made by sector bodies, such as UCAS, in meeting many of the principles relevant to them in the Commitment.
The report highlights the number of universities who have signed up to the Commitment. At the end of the first year, 15 have signed up, reflecting a range of sizes and missions.
This is encouraging progress for the first year and shows the relevance of the Commitment to many different kinds of higher education provider. The report also details the progress of the various working groups and communities of practice that have been developed to support progress.
It is worth repeating the views of two signed up universities:
The University of Law is delighted to be part of the commitment, with planning and development now being initialised across the university with a shared focus on quality of access and service for disabled students. The commitment also links directly into our ongoing Mental Health Charter Project and includes the recent recommendations from the Bristol Court case that concluded in February 2024.
We (at London South Bank University) have found our work towards the commitment complementary to our work around the University Mental Health charter. Both the Charter and commitment have given us the detailed framework to analyse where we are in relation to supporting our students. In conjunction they have given us confidence in producing our Disabled Student Delivery plan for the next three years, which we have crafted alongside our Disabled Student Panel. Since our work started in relation to the commitment a year ago, we have developed a whole institutional approach in relation to understanding and supporting the disabled student journey with student voice central to this.
If you want to find out more, please visit the DSC web pages referred to throughout this article. If you are a member of staff at a university, you could engage your student experience and/or learning and teaching committees in a discussion about sign-up. If you are a disabled student, you could write to your VC asking them to engage with the Commitment. Please email dsc@advance-he.ac.uk for any inquiries related to the commitment.
If you are a senior staff member in a UK university and want to sign up, you can either sign up by filling out the form on the Commitment page (The Disabled Student Commitment Members | Advance HE (advance-he.ac.uk)) or directly by sending an email to dsc@advance-he.ac.uk, containing a signed letter from the Vice-Chancellor or equivalent member of staff.
