Disabled Students’ Allowance.

Lord Addington Excerpts

Monday 2nd November 2015 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Addington]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they plan to make any changes to the disabled students’ allowance.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I thank all those who have put their names down to speak in this debate. I particularly thank the noble Baronesses on the Front Bench directly in front of me. They have had to put up with one or two changes of plan.

I declare my interests. Normally, it is just a case of referring to them, but on this occasion I think that I should go through them a little more fully. I start by saying that I am dyslexic. For nearly two decades I have been a user of assisted technology in my day-to-day life. I am a vice-president of the British Dyslexia Association and I am also the chairman of a company called Microlink, which deals with assisted technology and has a long involvement in a student loans company. It is a decreasing part of that company, which is a very good thing because we are now losing money on it.

My Question as originally put down asks whether the Government have plans to make changes to the disabled students’ allowance. It is now quite clear that they do. They are well developed plans and the consultation has gone out, which I have seen some of the documents for. The big question that comes up in this is the role of the universities where the students are studying—the HEIs, universities or call them what you like. What happens and what their role is in this new situation are vital, because if we look at the existing model we see that the institutions do not have to do that much. The disabled students’ allowance allows you a plan of support which is individual to you and which you take to the university. The university then integrates you into the system and does not have to do that much.

The Equality Act potentially draws this into question. However, we do not know exactly what the Equality Act would mean in terms of legal responsibility to the individual student because the best and most important thing about the current scheme is that it is an individually based package. Perhaps I may digress from the mainstream for the moment: as a dyslexic, there is something that I would have raised a long time ago if I had known this process was going on, just to show that the existing system is not perfect. It is the fact that dyslexics had to be assessed again, at the cost of several hundred pounds per individual, if they were dyslexic—not if they had another condition—because, apparently, the fact that they had been assessed for a lifelong condition at some point in the past was not good enough and they had to go again. It was most keenly argued for by people who seemed to be carrying out the tests—but let us leave that one where it falls. It could and should have been looked at in the past. It grew organically; it grew as you could meet needs going through the system.

However, you now have an individual structure. Will the university provide that individual package to meet the needs of the person? This is very important, because when you look through, you see a lot of talk about generic technology and providing it free of charge with no licence involved. As a user of this type of technology, software and back-up—I think that I am the only person in the Chamber who does, although I stand to be corrected—let me tell you one thing about it: if it is not reliable, it is not worth having. There is a lot of very cheap and shoddy stuff out there. If you do not have somebody you can go to to support you with it, it is not worth having. If you do not know when you switch on that device that you have got a system that allows you to interact with it, it is not worth having. What sort of support structure will be going in there?

Also—and I keep coming back to the individuals—are you sure you are going to get the right package for that particular student? If you take as an example one disability group, dyslexics—it is the biggest, but it is just one—you find that no two dyslexics are exactly the same. You have every variation, from the way their minds work and intellectual capacity to the type of course they are on. A history student’s support work will not be the same as that for somebody who is doing chemistry: they will need a different interaction; they will need to be trained to use it properly to get that interaction. This will mean an individualised training package and variations around it.

We then have the extra complication of what you have done before. How good is the computer that you are using? How much training have you had in it? How are you taking it on and being supported through there? Unless these factors are brought together, you are not going to get the best out of it. Worse still, we all know from personal experience that if you have something that you cannot use properly, you do not use it. Any money that is provided and any support that is not effective and accessible will basically be ignored. We might then have a situation where the university is in breach of the law. The government help, whenever it comes in, does not work; university help does not work. What are the downsides of that? If the technology is needed, I suggest that there is a very good chance that that individual will drop out of the course or at least underachieve. If they drop out, the university could find itself losing two or three years of fees and having a hole in their structure and funding. The person who drops out might not know what to do with the rest of their life. We also know that disabled people need to be better qualified to get jobs at all. So we have a nice little downward spiral setting in there. That is if you have not focused in on getting the best out of the system.

As we go around looking at this, we have to try to get some idea of exactly how the Government’s thinking is going through: what is going to happen next? If you are not going to require universities to have an individualised package—funding that supports that individual to get the best out of it—are you going to do something else? If you are, what? Do we continue with the same scheme, better audited and slightly better organised? Or are we going to go back to the universities? If we are, we have got to say, “You’ve got to deliver something that is user-friendly”. If it is not user-friendly enough to make sure that people will use it, do not bother.

Universities are very odd beasts; they run themselves. Are we going to make sure that there is a universal standard throughout the sector so that no student is restricted in their choice by what that university does? X University could become where you go if you are dyslexic; if you are deaf, you go somewhere else; if you are blind, you go somewhere else. How do we work these in together? How do we make sure that you take your package and you go to the course? The package will help you get through the course. But you need to be trained and you need to have the right technological support—you could say that training probably comes first: you have something that gives you the access point.

Are universities going to have to change their behaviour and impose on their staff changes in behaviour? Access to lectures is one of the big points. I gave up on lectures, so I really cannot comment too far on that; there again, in history, if you read the right textbook or, better still, get somebody else to read it on to a tape recorder—he said, claiming his own experience—it is a better way forward. Access to lectures is seen as being a very important part of many university courses. How are we going to make sure that academics interact with technology in storing information? It is just another way in which these pulls and pushes take place.

I could go on for a considerable time about this, going into more and more detail, and I am aware, as I just said, that dyslexia is not the only show in town, although it is the biggest group. How are we going to make sure that the new scheme works for the individual student? How can we guarantee standards so that they can access and get through?

Let us take a quick glance sideways now. We have just done a great deal of work on the Children and Families Act, making sure that further education and education generally support you until the age of 25. We did not touch universities, and were told that we were not going to touch them, because we had the disabled students’ allowance. We also have Access to Work, which runs another series of standards where you take on things that make you work independently—an important part of this scheme. Is that tying in as well? Unless we bring all these things together, we will ultimately fail and let down these people and waste money. I suggest that that is something we do not want.