Gutting the DSA with dodgy statistics - Part 2

A couple of months ago I wrote about the government's announcement regarding the Disabled Student's allowance, or DSA. I was horrified at the changes, which were not so much modifications as a massive gutting of the funding provided to disabled students. I was particularly incensed over their plans to stop funding laptops for disabled students, plans which were 'supported' through the use of what can only be described as dodgy statistics; statistics that look supportive at first glance but are actually completely irrelevant.

At the same time as writing the original post I also sent an email to my MP deploring the changes and the email was forwarded to David Willetts, the man responsible, who provided this response: 

In case that isn't easy to read I've transcribed the letter:

Dear Liam,

DISABLED STUDENTS’ ALLOWANCES

Thank you for your email of 10 April, enclosing correspondence from your constituent, Ms Sarah Hearne, about the recently announced changes to Higher Education Disabled Students’ Allowances (DSAs).

Supporting students to access and succeed in Higher Education (HE) remains a priority for government. This is best achieved through creating a system where Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are considering the needs of their disabled student body as a matter of course, alongside the provision of individual government funding for those with more specialist needs. Our aim is to ensure that students receive complementary support through their local authority, their HEI, and through government, to remove disability related barriers to learning. We are discussing the necessary guidance with stakeholders and we will provide information on responsibilities and support later this year.

DSAs are paid in respect of essential additional expenditure that a student is obliged to incur due to their disability while studying a course of HE. The current DSA scheme has been in place since 1990 and since then it has not been reviewed in the same way as other areas of student support. The changes we are proposing are about rebalancing the support that comes through government funding (via DSAs) and institutional support.

I have focused my reply on the five main areas that Ms Hearne raises.

The Endsleigh/NUS survey supports separate work undertaken by Ofcom in their 2013 survey on disabled consumers’ ownership of communication services, with a sample size of 4,095 respondents. This showed personal internet access for disabled and non disabled 15-34 year olds to be broadly similar, with 90% of disabled people under 35 having internet access, compared with 93% of non-disabled adults. In addition, evidence from the same report suggests there are differences in ownership and access to communication technology by socio-economic group and employment status. This information is detailed in the Equality Analysis which will be published in due course.

We recognise that students will continue to need non-medical help (NHM) support. Our policy is not to remove this, but to ensure that HEIs provide this where necessary. They are better placed to consider how to deliver their courses to ensure they are accessible to the wide range of students they are supporting. For example, the need for some individual NHM may be removed if courses were delivered differently or information provided in a different way. It may be that some support could be provided for groups, rather than individually. It is for HEIs to consider how they make both anticipatory reasonable adjustments and also reasonable adjustments at an individual level to meet the needs of their disabled-student body. DSAs will be available to complement HEI support, where we recognise that the support required goes beyond what HEIs could reasonably be expected to provide.

Ms Hearn [sic] raises concerns about accommodation. Many students will enter HE With a local authority Care Plan, which will cover the requirement for specialised accommodation. Those arrangements should continue once the student is in HE and no additional costs should fall to the student. Other students may request modified or specialist accommodation from their institution because of their disability, or from a large provider who has signed up to an accommodation code of practice, as a reasonable adjustment. In such cases, any additional costs should not be passed on to the student. DSAs will still be available to help disabled students meet the additional costs of specialist accommodation in exceptional circumstances, for example where the accommodation is provided by a private landlord.

With regard to consumables, DSAs are not intended to cover study costs that any student might have, regardless of whether they are disabled. It will be the responsibility of HEIs to ensure they deliver courses in a manner that is accessible to all students. We recognise that there will be some exceptional circumstances for certain students where they will need to be able to access help for consumables to ensure they have equal access to their chosen courses.

With regard to Ms Hearnes’ [sic] concerns about funding for institutions, alongside the funding HEIs receive from students through the fees they charge, government also provides financial support to institutions through the teaching grant. The Student Opportunity Fund is part of the overall Teaching Grant allocated to HEIs by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and it is their responsibility to take decisions on how their budgets are allocated. For 2014/15, HEFCE allocated a total of £366 million through their Student Opportunity Fund for widening access, student retention, and to support disabled students. The element for disabled students is designed to support greater access to HE for disabled students and improve their overall learning and teaching experience.

We have also established a new framework placing increased responsibility on universities to widen access. Those institutions with access agreements, agreed with the Office for Fair Access, estimate their will spend £713 million of measures to support access and student success for disadvantaged students (including disabled students) though their access agreements in 2014/15.

David Willetts

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There is so much wrong with this it's hard to know where to start.

Firstly, and arguably most pedantically, my name is referred to three times in the course of the letter and only once is it spelt right. This shows a lack of care in the typing that is reflected in the lack of care over the content.

I will take the letter in order, except for the paragraph referring to the Endsleigh/Ofcom statistics which I will leave until the end.

So, let's begin. . .

Supporting students to access and succeed in Higher Education (HE) remains a priority for government.

This just makes me laugh. This government introduced a bill that allowed universities to charge fees of up to £9,000 to English students. These fees are higher than those charged in Northern Ireland (and to Welsh students regardless of where they study - up to £3,575/yr) and Scotland (free). Raising fees three-fold is a funny way of "supporting students".

The same paragraph the utopia described sounds wonderful; "considering the needs of their disabled student body as a matter of course" and "remov[ing] disability related barriers". Who could argue with that? Well, I can when they go on to say:

"We are discussing the necessary guidance with stakeholders and we will provide information on responsibilities and support later this year."

This gives, at most, a year for institutions to determine what their responsibilities are and how to implement them. While a year may sound like a long time, it really isn't, especially when you're asking universities to take on a massive amount of new responsibility for a wide range of disabled students and adapt courses (which includes courses with field work and lab work) while they still getting their head around the responsibilities and the best ways to implement them. What if universities aren't ready after that year? Well, it's going to suck to be a disabled student starting university in September 2015.

Next we come on to Non-Medical Help (NMH). Mr Willetts states:

We recognise that students will continue to need non-medical help (NHM) support. Our policy is not to remove this, but to ensure that HEIs provide this where necessary.

Yet the guidance provided by his office states:

• DSA funding will no longer be provided for non-specialist non- medical help (NMH) support
  DSA will continue to fund the most specialist Non-Medical Help (i.e. as outlined in the SLC NMH manual bands three and four, and specialist roles).
  

This strongly implies that funding will not be provided for bands one and two which, as I explained in my previous post, covers help such as:

• practical support assistant (someone who, for example, helps you get around campus)
• library support assistant (someone who, for example, gets books on shelves to high to reach from a wheelchair) 
• reader (someone who reads to you if you're unable to due to vision impairment or other problems) scribe 
• workshop/laboratory assistant
• sighted guide
• proof reader
• study assistant
  examination support worker
• manual notetaker

I don't know about you but that list sounds like they are removing NMH for a lot of people. Now, they do go on to say that the universities will provide this help instead but they say that universities should "make both anticipatory reasonable adjustments and also reasonable adjustments at an individual level". Disabilities come in many forms and can be both mental or physical. It is hard to anticipate what adjustments are reasonable when you don't know what disabilities you are dealing with. I'm also concerned that the word "reasonable" keeps coming up yet I haven't seen any indication that they are going to define what is meant by the word. What is reasonable to one person may be unreasonable to another and unless there is a legal definition navigating the rules could be extremely difficult.

Accommodation is a fun one. Once again the letter sounds very reasonable until you stop to think for a couple of minutes. Universities generally offer a wide range of accommodation, from cheap old Halls to brand new buildings with all the mod-cons. Most students have the choice of which they want to chose. I chose the cheap old Halls when I first went to university as I didn't want to spend any more money than necessary on accommodation. I had that choice. But a disabled student may not have that choice depending on their disability. Old Halls often aren't wheelchair accessible, they may not be deaf-adapted, they probably aren't en-suite so they aren't suitable to those who require constant access to the bathroom (such as those with Crohn's disease). For disabled students who require these facilities the only place they will be able to find them are in the newer, more expensive, Halls. From what I understand, disabled students don't get a discount for this accommodation, they get charged at the same rate as their non-disabled peers. This financially penalises disabled students by removing any choice from them in terms of the cost of their accommodation. Accommodation is generally only guaranteed by a university for the first year and then the students are at the whim of the private sector, who will undoubtedly charge more for adapted rooms. Finally, the local authority (LA) Care Plan generally only covers "critical" support needs (i.e. those that will cause someone to die if the support is removed). It does not often cover people for whom independent living is possible should they be provided living conditions that are adapted to their needs. As more and more LAs are forced to cut their spending, fewer and fewer students will get help.

Then we're on to consumables. It may seem like a small thing but like all things, they're only small to those for whom they are unimportant. For those affected, they can be the difference between success and failure. From the letter:

"With regard to consumables, DSAs are not intended to cover study costs that any student might have, regardless of whether they are disabled."

It's worrying when a minister doesn't know what his policies cover, especially when he's in the process of cutting them. From the government's website on the DSA:

What DSAs can pay for
You can get help with the costs of:

•     specialist equipment, like computer software
•     non-medical helpers, like a note-taker or reader
•     extra travel costs you have to pay because of your disability
•     other costs, like photocopying [my emphasis]

Costs of producing notes in a format useful to students with visual impairment (those with blurred vision, for example) can quickly spiral. The costs are probably a small amount of the budget to the government yet they can be too much for a student to bear. Removing funding for this just seems petty.

 

Now we're on to the funding. This paragraph sounds like the government is being incredibly generous with their money. £366 million and £713 million! That's a lot of money. But let's break it down a bit. The £366 million is over all HEIs (Higher Education Institutions) and according to HEFCE they fund 130 HEIs, which means that's about £2.8 million per institution. The £713 million is a bit harder to partition. Wikipedia says there are 91 universities in England but the funding is limited to "institutions with access agreements" and the letter doesn't say how many institutions that is. Additionally, this funding is an estimate rather than an amount guaranteed to universities. But regardless of the precise number of institutions receiving the funding, both funds are for "widening access" of which supporting disabled students is a part. There don't appear to be any conditions or limits on how much of these funds are dedicated to supporting disabled students: it could be most of it or it could be barely any. And given that "it is their [the HEIs] responsibility to take decisions on how their budgets are allocated" it will most likely vary from institution to institution.

In summary, the government is removing funding from disabled students and while they are giving money to institutions to cover this withdrawal, the money they are giving is to cover "widening access, student retention . . . and student success for disadvantaged students (including disabled students)". Disabled students are just a small part of the student body this funding is supposed to cover and without ring-fencing to ensure money is spent covering the support that was covered by the DSA before the cuts, it is not at all clear how much of this money will be spent supporting them.

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That's a lot of problems and I'm sure you're all pretty exhausted but unfortunately we still have one problem left to cover and this one's a biggy. It's why I'm able to keep the title of the original post rather than come up with a new one. Would you believe that in trying to back up their original dodgy statistics, the government has chosen . . . more dodgy statistics!

For this round they realised that using marketing data from an insurance company wasn't going to cut it so have gone for something a bit more official. They referred to data from Ofcom, the Office of Communications, who work on behalf of the public to ensure that various means of communications are regulated, open to competition and held to professional standards. The letter refers to a report produced by Ofcom in 2013, yet interestingly it fails to give either the proper title or a source for this report. This may be an oversight or simply considered too difficult to do in a written letter, though more suspicious minds might wonder if it is to prevent anyone from finding and checking the report to see if it says what they say is says. Of course, this can't be the case because the details given are sufficient to find the report online, here, and anyone wanting to hide it would have done a much better job!

So, what's this report about? Does it look at students and their ownership of laptops and the sources of financing that allowed them to purchase those laptops? Surprisingly (or not), it doesn't. The report is looking the ownership and access of disabled people to various means of communication, from mobile phones to PCs. It is a broad-ranging report, covering disabled people from all socio-economic backgrounds, disabilities, and age-groups, and does a thorough breakdown of these differences in relation to their access to various types of communications. What it does not do is mention the word "student" or "laptop". Not once. It mentions "PCs" which it defines as "personal computer' (p91) but does not break this down into laptops and desktops, and it looks at household ownership rather than personal ownership. Additionally, the age-ranges covered are rather broad. The age of undergraduate students (18-25ish) is subsumed into the 15-34 category. How anyone is supposed to draw specific conclusions from an age range that covers children who live at home and have yet to take their GCSEs to people in their mid-30s who may be on their third career, second marriage and may have kids of their own who are nearly teenagers, is beyond me. It is certainly impossible to use any data from this group and say it tells you anything about students in higher education. 

But, putting this to one side, what about the figures that are provided in the letter?

"[The report] showed personal internet access for disabled and non disabled 15-34 year olds to be broadly similar, with 90% of disabled people under 35 having internet access, compared with 93% of non-disabled adults."

Yes, it did. In figure 1.15. No arguments there. But internet access is not laptop ownership. Many people can access the internet on their phone but I doubt they would use it to write their English essay. Furthermore,  the very next graph (figure 1.16) shows that disabled people in C2DE (‘working class’) are at a significant disadvantage compared to not only their ABC1 (‘middle class’) disabled compatriots but all non-disabled people. In other words, those most in need of assistance are also those most disadvantaged by their disability.

The question that needs to be answered is, do disabled students no longer require financial assistance to purchase their laptops? This is the argument the government and Mr Willetts appear to be trying to make yet the statistics provided are not capable of answering this question. What would answer this question are statistics provided by whoever oversees DSA applications, yet they have not provided these statistics. I can see two reasons for this. The first is that they don't have any figures which seems unlikely given the goverment's (or rather civil servants') love of numbers. The second is that the statistics show that there has been no drop in requests for financial assistance, that students are in just as much need of help to purchase laptops as they have ever been, and this is not something the government wants widely known. If this is not the case then I will happily retract this claim if I am shown the data. 

Access to computers is vital for any student and, arguably, more so for disabled students who may find getting to computer rooms difficult or impractical. Removing funding for this vital piece of equipment without strong evidence that doing so will not negatively impact student's ability to access and succeed in higher education is not only morally wrong but goes against the government's statement that:

"Supporting students to access and succeed in Higher Education (HE) remains a priority for government"

It should not be difficult to show the statistics for DSA applicants who have requested financial assistance when purchasing laptops. I say "requested" rather than "successfully requested" because if the government has been unofficially limiting who is eligible for funding then the statistics will show a decrease where none should exist. Of course I may well be being completely unfair but given their behaviour to date I am no longer willing to give the benefit of the doubt. However, show me that this is not the case and I will apologise unreservedly.

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There is much more that could be said but this is already far too long. I hope I have shown that what seems like a reasonable letter on the surface is actually full of attempts at deflection and distortion of the facts. That the government still can't provide relevant statistics is deeply worrying and strongly suggests that there are no relevant statistics that can support their claim that disabled students no longer need financial assistance in purchasing laptops. 

I have sent a letter in reply to my MP which I have been told will be passed on to Mr Willetts. I will wait for a response and will blog about it when it arrives. 

In the meantime I would ask that if you're as incensed as I am at these cuts which will jeopardise the success of disabled students in higher education then write to your MP and get them to contact Mr Willetts too. The more voices of dissent and anger that are heard the greater the chance that we can get some of these changes reversed or at least modified. 

There is much to be angry about, much that this government has done that hurts vulnerable people, and there is a sense of impotence that there is nothing that can be done and they are too powerful to care about what we say. This may well be true. But they can only get away with this because we let them. So write to them, tell them this is wrong, tell them why and tell them what they can do about it. They may not listen but they definitely can't listen unless you speak up.