Memorandum 23
Submission from Skill: National Bureau
for Students with Disabilities
1. Skill: National Bureau for Students with
Disabilities is a national voluntary organisation that promotes
opportunities to empower young people and adults with any kind
of disability to realise their potential in further, continuing
and higher education, training and employment throughout the United
Kingdom. Skill works by providing information and advice to individuals,
promoting good practice and influencing policy in partnership
with disabled people, service providers and policy makers. As
such, Skill is only responding to those questions that may directly
affect disabled students.
2. Skill would like to make it clear from
the outset that we strongly disagreed with changes to policy made
by the Department of Industry, Universities and Skills (DIUS)
to withdraw funding for Equivalent and Lower Qualifications (ELQ)
without having:
— appropriate consultation on equality
and diversity issues
— an impact assessment exercise, as
required by the Disability Equality Duty (DED)
— the true involvement of disabled
people as required by the DED.
3. It is not in the spirit nor, we believe,
in the letter of the law to announce policy changes with a view
to conducting a future assessment as part of the comprehensive
spending review. The Disability Discrimination Act (2005) clearly
states that new policies have to have an impact assessment and
that this impact assessment must involve disabled people. The
HEFCE modelling, accompanying the HEFCE consultation on this issue,
did not include a breakdown of numbers by equality strands such
as by gender, ethnicity or disability and, without this information,
it is unclear how general statements about how there will be no
differential impact on equality groups can be made.
4. Skill is opposed to the withdrawal of
ELQ as we are very concerned about the impact that these proposals
will have on disabled people who either become disabled after
finishing their degree, or whose impairment or condition deteriorates
to such an extent that they can no longer pursue their original
career. Such students may wish to undertake further training in
order to retrain to find alternative or better employment. People
with mental health difficulties may be at a particular disadvantage
as they may be barred from their first vocational employment because
of their illness and need to re-skill to return to the professional
labour force. Returning to study part-time can often be part of
their progress to better health and employment. Many disabled
people with mental health difficulties go on to study for counselling
diplomas in HE and many have first degrees earlier in their lives.
As unemployed people, they would never be able to afford full
cost recovery fees for these diplomas. Whilst institutions will
still have obligations to such students under the DDA, they will
no longer have the public funding to support these students and
this may lead to a reduction in the quality of support that is
available to them.
5. In addition, and perhaps more importantly,
such students would have to pay the full costs of being taught
for these degrees and this may deter them from further study,
which will then limit their employment prospects and life chances.
It is well known that disabled people are less likely to be in
work, and even where they are at work, are more likely to be in
lower paid and lower grade employment and are therefore less likely
to be able to afford the cost of retraining if this funding is
withdrawn. This directly contradicts the Government policy of
encouraging more disabled people into employment and directly
contradicts the Government policy and legislation to ensure a
more inclusive society.
6. Finally, whilst HEFCE proposes to instigate
a part-time supplement in the short-term, Skill believes that
the potential impact of removing ELQ for part-time degrees, in
the future, will be enormous and it may have a particularly negative
effect on disabled people who may choose to go back to study part-time
due to the daily demands of their impairment or condition. Removing
the part-time supplement will also prevent disabled adults who
acquire a disability from having the choice of part-time distance
study as an option where they may need to make career changes,
re-skill and even take a completely new course of study, for example
where their impairment prevents them from pursuing their original
professional career. Skill is extremely concerned that institutions
face the prospect of having to rationalise part-time courses from
2011-12 when the funding stream for this is reviewed.
January 2008
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