Changes to Disabled Students’ Allowances – how these affect your access agreement

Dear colleague

The Government has proposed changes to Disabled Students’ Allowances (DSA) that will impact on many institutions’ access agreements. We will issue full guidance on how to produce your 2016-17 access agreement early in 2015, but in the meantime this note sets out OFFA’s expectations on including support for disabled students in your access agreements so that you can factor this into how you manage the proposed changes.

About the changes to DSA

The changes to DSA will rebalance responsibilities between Government funding and institutional support. Some of the changes – for example in relation to the provision of equipment – will be implemented from September 2015, while others such as the changes to non-medical help will come in from September 2016.

Institutions have an obligation under the Equality Act 2010 to make reasonable adjustments for disabled students. This obligation will not change, but the types of support that can be funded via the DSA will change. OFFA will continue to support and encourage institutions to go above and beyond meeting their basic legal requirements in order to promote access, success and progression for disabled students. The Government has made it clear that it expects institutions to provide:

reasonable adjustments at an individual level anticipatory reasonable adjustments – these are general measures that might reduce learners’ reliance on DSA by mainstreaming support for them, for example by considering how methods of delivering courses and information may reduce the need for note-takers timely processes both for assessments and for appeals against an institution’s decision that an adjustment would not be reasonable.

There are full details in the Government’s draft DSA guidance for 2015-16 and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills will shortly publish an update on the changes.

OFFA’s expectations Flexibility

We appreciate that, when you come to submit your 2016-17 access agreement, you may still be developing your response to the DSA changes. We will allow flexibility in your access agreement to accommodate this. We will expect your access agreement to set out broad commitments about how you will provide for disabled students, but we understand that some aspects of this may change once you have set up your full programme of support. We also encourage you to work with students to develop your plans for support.

Changes that affect 2015-16 entrants

Where changes affect your 2015-16 entrants, you do not need to submit a revised 2015-16 access agreement or resource plan. You can tell us about changes made for 2015-16 entrants at a later date, during our monitoring of 2015-16 access agreements.

Countable expenditure

The following is an outline only. We will provide more guidance about our expectations on spend in our full guidance on producing 2016-17 access agreements.

What you may not count

You have a statutory duty under the Equality Act 2010 to make reasonable adjustments, so we expect all institutions to be meeting this commitment and the cost of reasonable adjustments will not be countable expenditure under your access agreement.

What you may count

You may count any expenditure on supporting access, success and progression of disabled students in your access agreement, where this:

goes beyond what would be considered ‘reasonable adjustments’ under the Equality Act 2010 relates to students covered by your access agreement (see “Which students does OFFA cover?” and “How do you define ‘lower income’ and ‘other under-represented groups’?”) is additional expenditure (see paragraphs 88 and 89 of OFFA publication 2013/01, How to produce an access agreement for 2014-15).    Balance of expenditure

You may look to make changes to the balance of expenditure in your access agreement to accommodate the changes to DSA. We will expect you to protect, wherever possible, expenditure on access, student success and progression activities (as opposed to financial support), in line with your institution’s overall strategy for widening participation and improving fair access.

Targets

Your access agreement may currently include targets relating to Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) performance indicator Table T7, which records widening participation of students in receipt of DSA. These measures may be affected by the changes, so you will want to consider whether a target based on HESA Table T7 is the most appropriate measure. For example, it may be more useful to look at the proportion of students declaring a disability and, where appropriate, disaggregate it by impairment type. Where you replace DSA targets with other measures of disability, we will not expect you to reduce the ambition of your targets.

Further information

If you have any questions about how to manage the changes to DSA in your 2016-17 access agreement, please contact Ben Spratt (ben.spratt@offa.org.uk, tel: 0117 931 7093).

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