As someone who has worked on researching how we best tackle inequalities, I regularly remind myself that evidence alone doesn’t make a difference.
Disabled students know they have unequal experiences in higher education, and what they want and deserve is for those inequalities to be addressed.
In higher education, as in research and policy generally, there is an increasing acknowledgment that institutions, practices, environments and attitudes need to change at a systemic level in order to improve disability inclusion. In contrast, reasonable adjustments – which are legally required under the Equality Act 2010 – can appear to accept structural causes of disability exclusion and focus too much on individual-level responses.
The thinking goes that if inclusive practices are built into an institution’s structure and processes then fewer reasonable adjustments will be needed over time.
