What fresh hell is this?
It takes a while to get there, but buried in a new Department for Education call for evidence on support for disabled students in higher education is a startling proposal.
There is, it says, a “fundamental question” as to whether an individual student should have a funding entitlement (ie a state responsibility) for specialist nonmedical help – or whether it should be the responsibility of a higher education provider (ie other students’ tuition fees) to provide that support to students.
That’s right – DfE is outline proposing to abolish a huge chunk of the Disabled Students’ Allowance in England, to provide “more scope” to “remove barriers” to disabled students’ participation and attainment.
It would also finish a job that was half done back in 2015 – when large chunks of what used to be funded via DSA were shifted onto institutional budgets, only for both core and disabled student-specific funding to be slashed per-student ever since.
