Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment her Department has made of the potential impact of recent changes to the Disabled Students’ Allowance on students’ ability to access assistive software where they have functional impairments arising from disability.

Supporting disabled students to access and succeed in higher education remains a government priority. The department’s consultation on assistive software funded through the Disabled Students’ Allowance (DSA) seeks to gather evidence on how best to modernise the support provided, taking into account the significant advances in technology in recent years.

The proposals in the consultation envisage that assistive software will continue to be funded through DSA where there is an additional disability-related need for it that cannot be met by any other software available to the student free of charge. The consultation closed on 18 June and no policy decisions on changes have yet been made.

We have undertaken an initial Equality Impact Assessment (EIA), the key points of which are set out in the consultation document. We intend to expand and update the EIA further as we gather more evidence of impacts through the consultation process. This will then be used to inform final policy decisions following the consultation.