Despite more than two decades of legislation to establish equality in education for disabled and or diverse learners, disabled students continue to tell us that university can feel like an obstacle course.
The barriers are rarely spectacular, they are cumulative. A lecture uploaded without captions here, a placement form that cannot be read by a screen reader there, an adjustment agreed in one department but lost somewhere between a registry system and a module leader’s inbox. Committed staff can be found everywhere, but problematic patterns remain unyielding.
That is the core problem our Office for Students-funded project sets out to address: in a mass, complex, data-driven sector, local goodwill and isolated fixes do not add up to equality. The numbers matter, as more students are disclosing disability than ever before, across every discipline and level of study.
Behind those patterns sit familiar barriers: inaccessible learning environments and systems; opaque, slow, or inconsistent processes; siloed responsibilities between academic departments and student services; and a tendency to treat reasonable adjustments as individual fixes rather than signs of institutional design problems. Disabled-led organisations such as Disabled Students UK (DSUK) and Disability Rights UK (DRUK) have been clear in stating that meaningful change needs meaningful collaboration with disabled people, not consultation after the fact.
So why has the sector not moved faster? Because the challenge, as our team have discovered, is ecological not episodic. Individual good practices exist, but without a joined-up approach or student leadership they do not add up to consistent or sustained equality.
Policy and case law have been clear for years about duties to make reasonable adjustments. Yet the practical experience of securing those adjustments and seeing them work consistently, module by module and term by term, lags behind. One reason is structural: student services and academic departments often own different parts of the reasonable adjustment pathway, with digital systems, estates, timetabling and external partners (for example placement providers) making decisions that affect implementation.
When responsibilities are split, accountability can be blurred; when data is siloed, feedback loops break down; when workloads bite, the exception becomes normalised. Our conclusion, based on lived experience, sector evidence and our own work with institutions, is that we have been treating an ecosystem problem with point solutions.
An ecological approach
When considering where disability equality and inequality are located in HE, the spaces, places and experiences we think of are shaped by relationships and meeting points between students, staff, timetables, curricula, estates, timetabling, assessment regulations, digital platforms, suppliers, and external points such as placement providers, funding assessors and employers.
If you change one meeting point, the effects are felt across the whole system, and if meeting points are not communicating or working in joined up ways, they experience limited success in their combined aims and objectives. In this case the equitable access, success and progression of disabled students in HE.
The ecological approach we are developing calls for joined up practices connecting actors, including students, programme teams, services, registry, estates, IT, and external partners to co-diagnose problems and co-design solutions. It works across timescales, from “use tomorrow” fixes (such as alternative formats) to structural shifts (such as assessment policy and data flows). It is transparent and makes accountability visible, sharing data, and providing feedback loops highlighting whether adjustments are timely, effective and equitable. Fundamentally, it centres disabled leadership, qualifying disabled students and staff as co-leaders, users and evaluators throughout, not just consultees.
Three steps for equitable university experiences
Our work is taking three key steps in developing this ecological model for the sector. First, we are mapping where and why barriers persist in the journey from a student disclosing a need to an adjustment being delivered in their teaching context.
That journey is seldom linear. It crosses multiple systems, is hands-offs, and it often requires invisible labour by students themselves to keep things moving. We are documenting these routes with our partners, leading disabled people organisations DSUK and DRUK, so we can co-design fixes that survive real institutional conditions. We are doing this by collecting accounts and experiences through surveys and workshops with disabled students, student services and academics.
Second, we are co-creating continuing professional development that address the needs of module leaders, personal tutors, programme leads, placement coordinators, timetablers, disability advisers and frontline advisers. The content pairs short, practical scenarios with data on timeliness and effectiveness, and prompts teams to move repeated adjustments into course design. By centring lived experience, we are producing “use-tomorrow” learning that is also a lever for upstream redesign.
Third, we are writing university guidelines on reasonable adjustments that bring together responsibilities, timeframes and escalation routes. This is a working pathway, visible to students and staff alike, with shared ownership across academic and professional teams. These resources will be published openly on an OfS-sourced platform to support sector-wide take-up and long-term evaluation.
Why a joined-up and co-created approach matters
There is no shortage of “good practice” lists in the sector. What we do not yet have is a user-led, sector-ready pathway that integrates roles, systems and timescales. Gibson’s user-informed, user-led, user-evaluated approach provides the model of practice behind this project’s work. With its emphasis on partnership, user-leadership and co-creation the model places disabled students and lived expertise at the core and front of the project in design, output and impact evaluation.
This approach reframes the idea of “reasonable”. A reasonable adjustment becomes not only something that can be delivered for an individual, but a signal about programme design and institutional capability. If the same adjustment is needed across a cohort, the reasonable response is to redesign. Staff recognise this logic; many are already pulling in that direction. The ecological approach provides them with a shared language, shared tools and shared accountability.
On that basis, these are our recommendations for the sector:
- Swap exceptions for design. Treat repeated adjustments as prompts to redesign curricula, assessments and processes so the need becomes built-in, not bolted on.
- Create a single visible pathway. Publish a plain-English route, co-owned by departments and services, for securing, implementing and reviewing reasonable adjustments, with clear timeframes and escalation.
- Close the loop with students. Ask disabled students if support was timely and effective, publish the actions you take, and track changes using measures that matter locally (as well as NSS/APP indicators).
A student’s experience should not depend on which member of staff opens their email. In an inclusive ecology, the pathway is transparent and defensible, the systems talk to each other; the same student does not have to re-explain across every module; adjustments are recorded, enacted and reviewed; and the lessons from individual cases migrate into programme-level design.
Our project aims to connect these practices into a pathway any provider can follow, and all the resources will be freely available for sector-wide use on an OfS-hosted platform.
The authors would also like to thank Kathrin Paal, Chloe Webster-Harris, Lucy Bartlett, Arianwen Fox, Lottie Atton, Elena Brake, and Tyrell King for their contributions.