 Good morning and welcome to the 10th meeting of the Equalities and Human Rights Committee. Can I ask the usual? Make sure your mobile phone is on flight mode or switched to silent please. We are moving into agenda item one, which is our draft budget scrutiny for 2017-18. Just to remind people that on Saturday 3 December is International Day of Persons with Disabilities. This promotes a UN convention on the rights of persons with disabilities, Dw i-dubl yn eenbdigol yn ysgrifennu. Mae cychwyn yn ei ailwyr rydyn ni oedd y bwysig ynghylch oherwydd 그chwyr cerdd. Efallai ti'r bwysig ynghylch yn ddigïddio â ddysbillig oherwydd mae gennym. Felly, hynny'n gwneud i'r rôl beth o'r ffordd o'r ffordd i'r gweithio. Mae gennym i ymwneud i gael. Rwy'n gweith pawr i chi i gyfyrdd ddim yn mynd i ddod. I'm delighted to welcome is Mark McMillan, who is the Employability Advisor with Deaf Action. Dr Ian Hutchison, who is a board member of Disability History Scotland. Professor Graham Turner is a director for the Centre for Translation and Interpretant Services in Scotland, based at Herriot-Watt. Lauren McDougall is a student and disability officer with Glasgow University students, a representative council. Rebecca Scarlett, who is a senior policy and information officer with LEED and last but not least, is Christopher Wilde, the Widen Access and Participation Officer at St Andrew's University Student Association. Good morning everyone and thank you so much for attending our committee this morning and for some of your written evidence. We greatly appreciate getting as much information as possible on this inquiry. You know the criteria for the inquiry that we're doing. We're looking at the Scottish Government's budget. We're looking at a specific aspect of that budget, Widen and Access. So we've been taking some evidence from people who are students, who are academics and who are organisations who support students. I noticed from the evidence that many of you had sent us that there was some aspects of the policy that you would want to explore further and maybe give us some insight into your experiences representing individuals and students at universities. I'm quite happy to open up if you would be quite keen to put on to records your thoughts and feelings about your experiences. I say that Lauren is nodding her head. Can I come to you first, Lauren, and let you come in? Sure, absolutely. I think that one of the things that I noticed from the evidence given in advance is that a lot of the issues are the same across the board. There's a lot of issues regarding pre-entry advice, which is a big issue, I think. A lot of students who are coming to university really struggle with finding out before they get there what life is going to be like as a disabled student, and that was definitely highlighted across the board from everybody. One of the things that could help with this, I think, would be more advice on perhaps UCAS, links to organisations who can support students with applications, that would definitely, I think, alleviate some of that pre-entry worry that students have. Some of the other issues that were raised that seem to be quite universal were things such as reasonable adjustments being provided once you're at university. One thing that I'd like to see would be more consistency. I think at the moment there's a lot of luck depending on which higher education institution you attend whether or not you get the same level of support as a student at another institution. I think that if there was some sort of sector standard that provided at least a minimum requirement of reasonable adjustments so that students knew that they were receiving the same level of support as other students at other institutions, just having a look through the papers as I go here just to make sure that I'm highlighting some of the key issues. One of the biggest issues, I think, especially for students at Glasgow, is that you can't apply for disabled students allowance until you're registered and you've accepted a place. This can create a lot of anxiety at the beginning of the semester when you don't have any support in place at all. This can be everything from assistive software to non-medical personal help. There's massive waiting lists sometimes into the second semester to get the support in place. We see a lot of students coming through the SRC at Glasgow University who are really struggling with the transition into university in the first place but struggling even more because they don't have those reasonable adjustments in place yet. It's a massive issue for student confidence but it's also a massive issue for retention. A lot of students spend that first semester at university already a bit worried that they've made that leap without these reasonable adjustments in place. It can be very difficult to convince students that it will get better, that you need to stick it out. I think there needs to be more of a focus on getting DSA applications in before the start of the semester. Once you've got an offer, if there was a more standard procedure across the sector, then it wouldn't matter which institution you were attending, you could apply for your DSA before you got there. For me, that's a pretty massive issue. I see lots of nodding heads here. Dr Hutchison, you gave us some very clear case studies and your evidence of some of the challenges that people have faced. I suspect that it's a leading on from that application stage to when you're at university. I'm labelled here as Disability History Scotland, which I'm very involved with, but the experience I was trying to convey in my submission was actually through university teaching, so it's more with that hat on. Over the years, I've encountered so many students with impairing situations, with different levels of support and different opportunities to access that support. I find it's very uneven. There are a lot of reasons for that. There are some very good support systems in universities, but there are also support systems that are overstretched. Perhaps there's not always appreciation among staff of the experiences that students with an impairment are going through, and I think that is a big issue. This gets on to identification, bearing in mind that there are people with impairments who don't want to self-identify, and that's their right, their privilege to do that, and they've got many reasons for doing that. You can quite often, at the beginning of a term, sit down with a new seminar group and look around you, and the chances are there'll be at least one student in that group who will be experiencing some type of difficulty impairment-related, and it's never the one that you think it might be. Identification, I think, is a big difficulty. I would say that, if you're looking about what investment should go into higher education to improve these situations, we're looking at education of staff, but all the contact staff that students might come in contact with, so they've a wider understanding. I think that some types of impairments, many types of impairments, are like other conditions. I'm sure the ladies will say, you don't really know what childbirth is like until you've gone through it. You don't know what having cancer or being close to someone with cancer, what life is like until you've gone through it. I think that's the same sort of thing. Education, but in addition to that, ability to empathise is also very important. These are the things that need to be developed so that staff have a greater understanding and a greater awareness because it is very varied. There are some staff who are great at giving support. Unfortunately, there are other staff who take the attitude that if you've got these problems and inverted commas, you shouldn't be here, which is totally wrong. That does exist to me. That would be worrying. Is it your experience that the teaching staff who are good at dealing with this are the ones who are always left to deal with it as well? I've taught at a number of universities, so I've got a bit of a cross-section of experience, but I think that the common guideline for teaching staff is not to get involved with students with these particular issues, refer them on to the specialist, to the counselling services, to the disability service, but there's quite a lot of students for a variety of reasons who are not accessing these services. Quite often it's the teaching staff at their first port of call. They're getting to know you through the course of a module and they come to you. I've always had a big problem of saying, well, you know, you can't really talk to me about that. You need to go to such and such. I refer them to these specialist services, but I always feel an obligation, that's the wrong word. I just feel it's the right thing that you've got to give them as much time as they need to talk about things and to explain their difficulties. We all understand that, but getting to one of the specialist services, I think maybe we could bring Mark in at this point. If maybe a student that's got an impairment or a disability or in this case maybe hearing loss, what kind of actions would be taken then to support them once they've been signposted by that thoughtful teacher? I think we really need to look at three different areas in my view, for myself having been through the university system as a deaf student. I know that a lot of deaf students have similar experiences also to me. What would really help is for access to communication support. That is the number one issue for deaf students because compared to other disabilities, perhaps with sight loss or other disabilities, it's very different. Our number one barrier is communication. I feel that we really do need to look at DSA, the funding that deaf people have to go through university. I do feel that DSA is not enough of a support for deaf students. My reasons for that, I would like to explain, is kind of similar to the other submissions. When deaf students go to universities, they need interpreters for lectures, working groups, seminars and so on. Also, socially, to be able to have a full university experience and DSA funding is only 21,000 a year, which means that their British Sign Language interpreter or a British Sign Language user like me can only afford to fund one interpreter. If they're lucky, they may also get a note-taker, but I really feel that that's not sufficient because university experience is lectures and workshops through the week, and an interpreter is having to work solo for an entire day. I had an interpreter that had to work for a three-hour lecture, who had to interpret for three hours without stopping, and that really wasn't a good thing because things like meetings and situations like this would always have two interpreters to work with a deaf person so that they can work together, they can take turns and ensure high quality, but in university there was only one interpreter working for long periods on their own, and that is an issue. Also, around about break times and lunch breaks, for a deaf person being there on their own, trying to mix and socialise with other students with only one interpreter who needs to get away and get a break themselves after working for three hours, that can leave a deaf person in a lunchroom, in a social situation with no communication at all, and trying to mix with other students as a deaf person using a pen and paper was just so, so difficult, and that's not how deaf people usually communicate. We use sign language, so having no kind of support there wasn't helpful in my experience. So I think DSA does need to be reviewed so that there's enough funding for enough interpreters to really support deaf people through the whole university experience. Also for me, working as an employment adviser, access to work to support is there to help people to do their jobs, and they can be funded up to £40,000 a year. In my own role I use interpreters for meetings, phone calls and so on, but in university it's around £20,000 a year, or 30 hours a week of interpreting. We need more interpreting in university for deaf students. Also linked to that, things like social events and know that a lot of hearing people when they go to university, they go because they want to learn, but also they want to have that social experience, they want to develop their social skills, and I don't feel that deaf people have that same kind of opportunity. I'll tell you about my own example. In Freshers week when I arrived at university as a new student, you know what it's like. I was two weeks of meeting people and getting used to the university experience, but I found that my interpreters were only funded from day one of the actual course itself. Freshers week was a real lost opportunity for me. I arrived in the first day, everybody was all in their little groups, they were all sat together, they'd made their friendships and bonds and I arrived from my first lecture and they said, would you please pair up? I had no one to pair with because I hadn't met anyone yet. So it would be good for universities to look at those kind of social events like Freshers week, because university needs to be more of just learning, it's building confidence, it's socialising, it's learning together, so I feel that's an important issue. And if I can just also add what I would love to see in university is more staff who advise disabled students that are deaf themselves, which would mean that they'd have that empathy that was mentioned by Rebecca earlier. I feel at the moment there's a lot of disabled students that go to university that have that knowledge of using a wheelchair, of having a sight loss of being deaf, but the staff don't have that experience themselves. And that would be so good for deaf students to have someone deaf to speak to at university. So universities could try to recruit more deaf staff and encourage more deaf staff, encourage disabled and deaf people who have degrees to come back to university and become lecturers, become teachers themselves. That would really add to the experience and attract more students as well. And when they meet deaf and disabled students to have that real empathy, they'd have the full picture, they'd have the full information that they'd be able to offer really helpful advice. So yes. Really helpful advice indeed. Mary, I think you wanted to come in at this point. Thank you and good morning everyone. I wanted to explore a bit further the topic that Lauren raised about reasonable adjustments. And I'd be interested in your views on whether reasonable adjustments mean an assessment is done at application stage, or is the assessment process something that is revisited regularly? Because whoever supports are put in place at the beginning may not be the supports that people need on an on-going basis. So is there capacity to look at changes to the support package and changes to what adjustments are made and how much dialogue is there between the person that requires the adjustments and the person that's making the adjustments? She came in with a lot of information on reasonable adjustment and how that could be done. So maybe you're best to start answering Mary's question. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm not based in a university and I think that each university will have different processes of how they approach that. And I think absolutely there is the capacity to go back and review the assessment and what's in place. I think the issue lies with, you know, the emphasis on the student, the ability to speak up and to say that actually this is not working, this is difficult and I need more help or I need a change. That is where the big barrier exists because it's not to say that an assessment can't, it can't be a reassessment and they can't change the adjustments that are in place. But in my opinion, there's not enough constant dialogue. There's not enough of a process where a disabled student can go and access that advice on a regular basis, the emphasis and the honours is on them to approach. And I think if they've had a negative experience in the first instance and they've not had the right adjustments put in place, then it's a real barrier to be able to speak up and to ask for more help when it's not working. Certainly that's the experience that's reflected from the students that call the helpline. The responsibility on starting that dialogue should be with the institution that the students are attending, not the student himself. I think that there should be more responsibility from the institution to be finding out how the student are getting on and how are those adjustments working. I think sometimes we hear on the helpline that although a student has declared that they're disabled and has had an assessment, sometimes it seems to come as a surprise to the academic tutor that they don't seem to be aware that there was a need for an adjustment in place. There's been a lack of communication. We have a lot of instances of students having difficulty with policies like absence levels. Students are maybe being off sick because of something related to their impairment and the academic tutor is asking them to leave before exploring the reasons as to why. According to the Equality Act, policies need to be adjusted. Even if they're not directly discriminating students, they need to look at how they might be indirectly discriminating against them. There are issues where the academic tutor doesn't seem to be aware that there's an issue in the first place and sometimes there's a lack of communication between the disability services and the academic staff. You touched on the next question that I wanted to ask, which was around flexibility. How much flexibility is available for students to be able to say, I won't be able to do the set time table for the next month because of and can I have more time to complete an assessment or complete a piece of work? Is there flexibility there to do that? Absolutely, but again, it ranges so widely across the sector. In fact, one of the issues that we've picked up on in people who are thinking about accessing university is one of their key concerns, is how will I manage if I'm not in that day. Again, there is not enough being done in my opinion in terms of allowing that flexibility. I've supported or given advice to a number of students in the last couple of weeks, actually, where that information, again, hasn't been in the support plan in the first place. I think that a student has an appointment with a disability officer and says that I'm going to need that flexibility. There seems to be real inconsistency, again, of how that is communicated to the academic staff. But there is the capacity to do it, but how flexible it is is not always meeting the needs of everybody. Everybody has such wide needs and different impairments. For some people, they have set policies and they'll give a bit of flexibility, but they won't stretch beyond that. It's not working for some disabled students who have more complex health conditions. Does anyone else on the panel want to comment? Add a little bit about the flexibility situation. The standard seems to be that if students need a bit of an extension a week, maybe even a fortnight, they can quite often be negotiated. There have been instances I've come across where the situation has been such that it's been authorised that, okay, how long do you need to do this? We want to take the pressure off you, forget about deadlines, we want to get you through this, but I would say where that flexibility has been offered in cases I've come across, there are actually few and far between, so it would be a bit of a halfway compromise between those people who have had an open-ended deadline and the rest who might get a week or at best a fortnight, greater flexibility for a greater range of people. Thank you, convener. I just wanted to pick up on the use of the term reasonable adjustments, because it seems to me that whilst we're talking about lots of micro-adjustments in particular instances, the notion of what is reasonable is obviously a contextual issue, and in all of the evidence that you heard last week, there was a lot of talk about this requiring system-wide change, which entails changing the whole context in which these decisions are made. So I just wanted to draw attention to that aspect of all of these problems. We're talking about chronic, persistent, system-wide wicked kinds of issues, and therefore, problematising what we think of as a reasonable adjustment means stepping right back from the micro-adjustments in individual cases and asking what sorts of provision need to be put in place right through the educational system, not just at the higher educational level. And right across the educational experience, as Mark has commented, it's not just about making adjustments in classrooms. Thank you. Mary. No more questions. All right. Thank you. I've got Willie next. Just, convener, and good morning, everybody. I wonder if I could take you all back to the very beginning of the process in trying to get into university or college through the application process and to ask you about any barriers that you have encountered or the students that you have come to contact with have experienced in trying to get into university in the first place. I noticed in Rebecca's submission there was an example there of a person with a disability being refused entry to university, but it simply said that there was a high level of competition and the disability markers and so on were not taken into account. So I would just like to ask if each of you have an experience that you could tell us about the difficulty in getting in the door in the first place. Christopher, I was wondering if this is maybe a point that you would come in just given your experience at St Andrew's. Yes. There was two things about admissions. One is that we've found at the university that students tend to admit disability once they've arrived at university and they're concerned about marking on their UCAS form that they are disabled in the application for fear that it might be detrimental in terms of that application. Although it isn't as far as a university are concerned, they'll make as many adjustments as are necessary, but students do feel that there's a fear that they may or may not get accepted to universities if they are seen as disabled. Another issue that came up, which was from the university, although not from students, was with British Sign Language students. We currently don't have any students who require British Sign Language interpreters. Though there was a significant concern from the student support that there were not enough interpreters available if a BSL student came to the university and what Mark was saying that to have enough BSL interpreters to provide support for educational support for social support, they believed that there would be considerable difficulty in providing that student with the amount of interpreters they would need in order to be at the university and they would have to look quite carefully at the application and about how they would build a package around that. There was quite a lot of concern there. In terms of application as a whole, what Lorne was saying at the beginning about disabled students allowance, the assessment centres take about four to six months. We have two students currently who are waiting on support and that is going to take probably till about next May, which is almost at exam time for the end of their first year, where they have spent a year with practically no support. The university are giving as much support as they can, but there are things like laptops that they require, specific to them, particularly large-sized laptops that the university do not have and cannot provide, but there is no funding for it because it is taking almost a year for the students to get funding and support, which is a huge challenge for them. That is causing a lot of stress for people. We are coming up to exam period now at universities and these people have not had any support for the entire first semester and the university are trying to compensate for that, but there are limits to what the university can do. To add to that in terms of the application process, just echo in what I put in the written submission, is that there is not really enough opportunity to sometimes be able to disclose enough information that might potentially support an application. You have seen from the commission on widening access around contextual information, but that is not always possible with a disabled student. Of course, not everybody wants to over disclose and for that to be taken into account, but for some people there may be a reason why they cannot relocate, they cannot travel, they cannot move out of the city that they live in because of the package of care and support that they need or their inability to travel. I really think that that should be taken into consideration when thinking about whether or not to offer that student a place. If they cannot go to anywhere else in the country, then I think that universities need to take that into consideration when thinking about admitting them on to the course. Professor Turner? Just to add perhaps that talking about the issues that arise at the admission stage is already starting a little bit late in the process. For BSL-using students, the issues started much earlier. For example, in respect of raising the aspiration to attend university at all in the first place. The evidence recently from the National Deaf Children's Society in Scotland that deaf students are still underrepresented at higher education level in Scotland and that attainment levels are not being encouraged that would enable those deaf students to even consider applying to university. So there's a lot that the universities could already do to encourage that aspiration. They could, for example, produce marketing and recruitment material in BSL that invited deaf students to say, that's a university I want to identify with. They could run access programmes, summer programmes. I know this was also mentioned last week. It's a recommendation of the blueprint for fairness. Summer programmes for BSL users to bridge that gap into higher education would also be welcome, I think, in that sense. When we mentioned the shortage of interpreters, again, I flagged that up as another indication that this is a system-wide problem. In fact it's not confined to a problem that higher education itself can resolve because that shortage of interpreters is country-wide across all of the public services and if we therefore set a target in the short term to say every university in Scotland will be equally accessible to all BSL users we would indeed find a problem with a shortage of appropriate interpreters and therefore we need to set a series of targets over a period of time, building blocks in place that enable us to build towards putting that provision firmly in place across the board. Professor Turner said that. I also think there are a number of barriers for deaf students wanting to attend university. Primarily because our first language is not English, if somebody's first language is British Sign Language, then the information about the university and the support on offer there needs to be provided in BSL. I don't think universities take on enough responsibility on their websites and their other information to include information that would attract deaf students. They can easily embed some information in BSL onto their websites that would be really useful and beneficial. Again, even making contact with universities is very difficult for a deaf BSL using a potential student. You can't simply make a phone call to somebody. You'd need somebody to interpret that phone call for you and so on. Then the people on the receiving end often don't know how to handle that call so there are a number of problems just in that process. I think if deaf students within education were aware that universities had a number of deaf staff and other deaf students there, it would be very attractive or much more attractive to them to want to aspire to attending those universities. If those staff really engage with the deaf community and try to engage with the community and attract them and get them interested in higher education, that would be really valuable. I know some universities are very good and proactive about considering applications and thinking about what needs to be done. Others are not. A lot of deaf students have to take on responsibility for organising their own communication support and booking their own interpreters and so on for the whole of their courses. That is a massive undertaking and a massive responsibility in administrative load that other students do not have. It adds greatly to the stress that deaf students have at university and, as I say, gives them a very much heavier workload. Lordin. Support to what Rebecca said earlier regarding contextual information. One of the biggest issues that we hear about from applicants is not being able to explain perhaps gaps in education, gaps in employment. If there was a way that this contextual information could flag up as an issue of widening access so that those applications were considered under perhaps different criteria, students would feel a lot less anxiety about trying to explain their application. At the moment, the personal statement itself is very long. To fit into that short piece why you've perhaps been out of education or why you've been out of employment, it doesn't leave a lot of space for the other things that you need to cram into that very, very small statement. I think there needs to be a space for more contextual information to be provided. I also think one of the biggest anxieties we hear about from applicants is just not knowing what to expect. There needs to be more clear advice on the sorts of adjustments that are made for you when you're at university so that you can know whether or not this is for you, to know what support could be available to you. At the moment, there seems to be quite a lot of secrecy about what support might be available. Students do really struggle with knowing what they can ask for. I don't think they should be on the student to know what sort of support is available before they get to university. There needs to be a lot more robust pre-entry advice that would help to alleviate some of that anxiety for applicants. You want to come back, will you? I want to stick with this mysterious contextual information that has to be supplied by students before they get in the door. The example again, Rebecca, that you gave, was a person who was more than qualified for the particular course. Do you feel that students with a disability are reluctant to supply this information for fear that it may be used against them or are they just not aware that they can trigger the widening access markers so that this information is taken into account and must be taken into account? The issue is that it's not going to be taken into account and that's what we're saying, that there are widening access markers but they're not related to impairments or disabilities so there needs to be a process for allowing that. I think that there will be many students who will be really keen to disclose and to talk about the issues that they face and, as Lauren says, why there are so many gaps, there will be other students who will be less so because there is so much perceived fear about disclosure and about the impact that that's going to have. At the moment, that's not an opportunity necessarily to be able to disclose. This student in particular constantly tried to engage with the disability office to try and explain this really non-linear stretched-out process that she had made to get to that point but they refused to accept anything and said that disabled students' applications would be treated the same as anybody else's and wouldn't be given special preference but actually the Equality Act says that it's not illegal to treat disabled people more favourably. In that instance, they could have taken that contextual information if she had the minimum academic competencies so we're not saying that they need to lower the entry requirements or that minimum or more but there's capped places in terms of how many people they can take from Scotland and the EU in terms of admissions. In discussing this particular issue, there's one student that comes to particular mind here and this is a young woman who had done an undergraduate degree and completed it and applied for a postgraduate study and in that instance she had to attend an interview and the way she narrated it to me she was declined and the way she narrated it to me I very much got the impression that the interviewer was seeing the disability and not the person I might be doing that person whose identity I don't know anyway a disfavour but that's the impression that I gained and the student said to me after it well you know it's obviously not to be and I said well look do you really want to do postgraduate study and she said oh I'd love to do it and I said well let's look for other options different courses, different institutions now she was limited as Rebecca highlighted in terms of where she could do that but there were some options open to her to say that she did apply for another course and she got that postgraduate diploma but so nearly that opportunity was missed and her own fulfilment would have been inhibited as a result of that Professor Turner we've heard a lot about the equality act this morning but maybe you could give us a wee bit insight into the British Sign Language Act and the duties that are placed on public bodies including universities in that act so well I think Parliament achieved something quite remarkable last year in passing the British Sign Language Scotland Act part of what is remarkable about it is the notion that it is not couched only in terms of ensuring access for BSL users to the wider society but the headline terminology is that we will promote the use and understanding of British Sign Language and I think in the context that we're talking about here there are a wide range of really exciting things that we could do at higher educational level and indeed throughout the educational system to promote the use of BSL just in the context we're here we're talking about application processes again for example how about enabling BSL users to apply to university in BSL that would seem to me to be a nice way of promoting the use of BSL but it completely changes the terms upon which that application interaction takes place if you like and it does give them an opportunity to say okay here's what I will bring to the university not what I will take from you not what I need from you changes the terms entirely and that kind of systematic shift in thinking is exactly what the BSL act is trying to nurture right across the country Thank you so much for that Mary, have you got a supplementary on this or is it a separate point Jeremy, can we have your questions next? Good morning again thank you very much for coming I've got three questions but before that I wanted to thank Mark particularly for his statement on the issue around outside the course Thursday's week what happens in the evening at the union I think it's really important and it's something we need to go away I'm not asking a question on that but I didn't want to lose it in the importance of what we've said My first question and I'm happy for anyone to jump in on this one is in regard to we use the term disability but disability is a wide terminology you can have physical disability you can have learning difficulties you can have mental health issues you can have lots of disabilities from your experience is there a hierarchy if you have this disability you're going to get a better experience compared if you have that disability you have a less good experience so the university is better set up for some disabilities compared to others I was just reflecting back on the evidence that you gave a while ago about certain pieces of equipment not being available at St Andrew's and maybe BSL not being available at St Andrew's but I don't know whether that's a question that you can answer and then elaborate a bit on what is available certainly BSL students would be welcome at St Andrew's it's the lack of interpreters available the university would try and support them as much as they could I've certainly found talking from students I only got asked to this panel last week and this isn't exactly my directive of expertise so I've been speaking to students over the past week about their experiences and what I've generally found is that once support is in place that support seems to be working quite well there are some issues with it in terms of staff not always being informed as when the panel members mentioned earlier about education with staff as a student association but generally for most students once that support is there that seems to be quite acceptable and it seems to work well for them Mary was asking earlier about changing of that and how that if they need it altered that seems to be very easy once that's there and the university do seem to provide a lot of support and the students seem generally very happy with that in terms of a hierarchy help for disabilities there doesn't seem to be one certainly our university I don't know about the experiences of others although the amount of people with different disabilities is changing, mental health for example is becoming a much bigger issue we had 12 students who were registered with a mental health disability in 2009 there's now 320 and part of that has been education about educating students, we now have a mental health week we had a masculinity mental health event last night so this is improving that in terms of support, once it's in place once the disability student allowance comes in or if a student doesn't require that and there's a learning plan in place from the offset that seems to be working pretty well generally for the students at our university Lauren I'm not sure whether or not there's a hierarchy but there's certainly some certain disabilities that are much easier to put support in place or they're more common there's already a very clear pathway of how the support will be put in place I think at Glasgow the disability service have seen a real rise in students registering with mental health problems and also students with long term chronic health issues and those pose more difficulty with providing reasonable adjustments because they tend to be a lot more individualised so there's not necessarily a hierarchy but there are students whose support is put in place a lot more quickly because it is much more standard and there's already a protocol you know this is what you will get whereas for students who perhaps have more complex needs there is more difficulty longer waiting lists and maybe not as much information about the support that's available particularly with mental health issues I think it's probably across the sector counselling and psychological services are chronically underfunded and students with kind of long term mental health conditions when they go to their GP if they are at university the GP kind of washes their hands of them and says this is your university's responsibility to look after this but then waiting lists can be months long so it can cause a lot of problems and I think with the non-medical personal health part of DSA some students do get mentoring support that falls under mental health and counselling support but it's not consistent to access more long term mental health support under this part of DSA particularly as mental health impacts on their studies so it is relevant that would alleviate some of the stress on counselling and psychological services at universities and would leave that more open to the short term needs of other students if the people with long term mental health conditions were being supported under DSA I think that could certainly be something to be looked into Jeremy I wonder if I can oh sorry did you want to come in Professor Mayor thank you just in relation to the BSL issues there the reality at the moment is and I'm sure Mark would support this claim that there really is no university in Scotland that has made itself a magnet for deaf BSL using students there are universities south of the border to which BSL users will go in preference to applying to any Scottish university because none of the Scottish universities have actually flown a flag to say we really understand what it means to make our university accessible to BSL users so there's a severe chicken and egg problem there the students are smart enough not to go to a university that has no reputation for providing proper support and too many experiences I think that we could all point to where universities have said oh yes we'll put this provision in place when a student arrives student arrives and then the university turns out not to know the difference between a level 1 interpreter or sorry a level 1 BSL user which is low and a level 6 BSL user which is high and inverts the thing and provides a service that is not effective at all goes back to my point about what we mean by reasonable adjustment have you got a supplementary here Mark and that's why we need to involve deaf professionals in university more because they have first hand experience of deafness and BSL and sign language and they can put in the appropriate support I do feel at the moment that it's a very pan disability approach and our employment service for example employment advice is very pan disability and universities have a pan disability approach and I feel that it does have a negative effect on access for deaf people because this pan disability approach can be good but a lot of the time there's not enough focus on the needs of individuals and the needs of deaf people and that's why I really strongly feel we need someone with experience of being deaf of using interpreters so that the appropriate support can be put in place and for me as well I think that deaf people have an extra issue is that a lot of deaf people don't view ourselves as disabled we feel that we're a cultural and linguistic minority rather than a disability group which causes more of a barrier to accessing university because it's a language access issue rather than a disability issue so I think we need to look at language access and improve that for deaf people rather than seeing it as purely a disability issue and providing language support professionals in the university to understand that well in terms of the notion of is there not a kind of hierarchy I think it's worth flagging up that there are many students who actually have more than one disability so individual needs are quite often very individual and complex you might have a student who has a mobility issue but there's also problems with articulation a deafblind student and quite often sensory impairment physical impairment the challenges that they present for students might also have impacts on their mental health and coping with these particularly upon arrival at university so that brings another aspect into the overall problems and needs which they're having to address We're finding in this inquiry is how many layers there is when it comes to supporting people Jeremy, do you want to come back? Just a couple of quick questions I could again just maybe to Dr Hudson I appreciate you're not here in regard to history but I wonder whether you could set some context I was talking to a lady last night of her reception and her view was things have moved really very little in practice since the late 70s, 80s Would you have any historical view on we may have passed lots of legislation and we may have put lots of procedures in place but actually the experience of a disabled person at university today compared to someone going in you've got to be careful 80s doesn't sound that long ago but in the 80s is not that different There have been gradual improvements I think over time if any of you want to google the name Fred Reid Fred Reid is a blind gentleman who was discouraged from going into higher education when he was a young man in the 1950s and he succeeded against all the advice that he was being given to the contrary not to raise his sights too high I think there certainly have been improvements but the difficulties that people with different impairments encounter go back in higher education and in a lot of other spheres is to the people that they're interacting with the able-bodied people they're interacting with so it does still get back to problems of education and learning of empathy and I think those problems still exist maybe not to the extent that they existed 100 years ago or even 50 years ago but they do still exist yet we're being told that 20% of the population in Scotland will identify as having a disability so we should be a lot more aware of the different needs of individuals and the different problems they encounter the aspirations they have and see them as people and not just as a disability My final question is to Christopher and I appreciate you're not here to represent the university you represent the student union but it was interesting I was talking to my nephew who graduated last year from St Andrew's and my niece who's just a first year at St Andrew's and I said to him perhaps St Andrew's not got the best record for disabled students we're in a historic building how can we make these adaptions and do you think some of the old universities like St Andrew's, Glasgow, Edinburgh and the Dean use that as an excuse when we talk about reasonable adaptions do they say well we've got an 18th century, 19th century building we can't adjust it so we just won't do anything at all and do you think that's an excuse that maybe the historical universities use and how do we get past that excuse particularly for those who have access issues and other issues to accommodation and lecture halls That's the aspect that you might find difficult to answer No Certainly students have had challenges with getting access to buildings there are some buildings at St Andrew's where people who have issues with fatigue for example we had a student with ME who couldn't access and was asked to go to a tutorial five stories up so there are some buildings which are simply not accessible however what we do have is almost all the buildings are accessible on some level so even where we have our psychology building which is an inaccessible building if you're in a wheelchair you can't get into the building there's no two ways about that however 100 yards down the road there's another building with rooms in it so what the university tends to do is to move whole tutorials if you're aware of a disability and aware of a mobility issue into any of these buildings they will move a tutorial or a class to another building there have been challenges with staff with that there's no two ways about it where we had a student who's now left the university she's now studying at Edinburgh and doing a post-grad but she had challenges getting up to the tutorial on the fifth floor and was told we've been in this room for the past 15 years the university got involved with that and eventually managed to deal with it but it did take about 8 or 9 weeks so there's no doubt about it that we can accommodate students with access to buildings which are inaccessible because we have alternatives but there are certainly still issues with it in terms of how much staff will try and adjust and the balance between what you were saying about reasonable adjustments how much the staff will want to move in terms of how much our student services department want them to move can be quite challenging and that's something we're trying to work at thank you I had one student who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis during the course of her study so it was having a mental impact on her as well but the physical condition seemed to be quite progressive and one day she came to see me I didn't know she was coming I was in a garret up on the fourth floor of a traditional university and she struggled up four flights of stairs and I was horrified but her response was well it took me a wee while it was a bit painful but I didn't want to make an issue of it and that's again one of these situations where the student was undertaking discomfort a particular case that comes to mind of a student who was trying to access a particular school of an ancient university and they went to visit it they were a wheelchair user and while on the outside it looks as though there was a lot of adjustments and it was accessible when they actually tried to access it the button was broken in terms of opening the doors and there wasn't anybody available and the lecture theatre wasn't accessible so they immediately wrote that the school was off but again there wasn't anywhere else in the city that they could go to but on further investigation I advocated on her behalf and the university said we will do everything that we can to try and relocate these classes as you were saying but it takes for someone to intervene for the student to find that out and a lot of the time they're going to be put off before they get to that stage that this is not something I want to take any further I don't want this inconvenience if it's not inclusive enough but there are things that ancient universities will do in terms of the building access Do you think, Rebecca, that there should be a much more preemptive attitude? Absolutely, yes. The things like a broken button so that a door doesn't operate is a simple thing that should have been fixed? Definitely, it's a requirement of the Equality Act that education providers need to anticipate a range of different needs with students with a range of impairments but quite often it's very reactionary so a lot of the time things are not happening and it's a response to when that problem goes wrong rather than thinking about what can be done in advance. Sometimes, as you mentioned, Onus is on the student so perhaps the timetable will allocate a room without any consideration to whether or not there's anybody with physical accessibility issues and it's not until a student tries to access that particular teaching space that they realise it's inaccessible and by that point you're already at the start of the semester and that then causes problems with having to relocate the class I think there needs to be more provision before classes are timetabled and booked as to whether or not there are students with physical accessibility needs which kind of goes back to the whole not being able to register with disability services in time so departments don't have this information in time and classes aren't being timetabled in the right way and I think one of the other issues with physical accessibility which people tend to forget is some of these campuses are very large and you could be trying to get from one end of a campus to the other with 10 minutes in between a class and if you have any sort of mobility needs at all that can be very, very difficult and it's those kind of minute issues that get looked over because they're not seen as or they're not as obvious as perhaps ramp entry or push button doors, they're a bit more abstract and people tend to forget about them and again it's not until students highlight this once they're at the university that there's anything that can be done about it so I think there needs to be a bit more preemptive thought about these wider issues I think we keep coming back to the application process and even earlier than that maybe pre-UCAS whether you're thinking about universities Mark, did you want to come back in at that point? Yes that we need to remember that physical disability and physical barriers are not only sort of for the barriers that we encounter there are attitudinal barriers and they can be as big or worse than the physical barriers that you experience sort of my experience is shared with a lot of other students are going to lectures and asking for lecturers you know if it's possible that they have kind of a short break because you've only got one interpreter working there and it's also sort of very very hard to focus on an interpreter you can't write notes at the same time you're really focused on the interpreter and the language and lecturers saying they won't adapt their style of teaching to accommodate me as a student in the class or whatever or they'll say yes I will, I'll break after 30 minutes but then they forget and so these kind of attitudinal barriers I think really need to be addressed and I think for example providing university staff with deaf awareness training before a deaf student starts studying at the university would be hugely beneficial not just for the staff but actually for the students who would be in those situations with the deaf student and I think for all the people who would engage at all with that deaf student to be given deaf awareness training would be really beneficial because if you think of the sort of group activities that you do with other students maybe preparing presentations and so on for interpreters to be able to engage with that sort of activity along with the deaf student it would make an enormous amount of difference if the students also had some awareness of the issues involved Thank you for that Alex Good morning everyone Mark I'd like to start by thanking you for the insight you've given us to your experience as a student and in particular I was very struck by your initial testimony about your experience of things like Freshers Week and Jeremy touched on this as well but I have some specific questions about that I think that the student experience is something that universities seek to market is not just the course or the quality of the qualifications that they have to offer but it's the student experience and I know from myself visiting a number of universities it was really that feel and that vibe and that social side of things which swung my choice notwithstanding the other universities wouldn't have me I met my best man in Freshers Week and lots of things happened to me outside in the margins of university which shaped me as a person I was really struck that you said that the support that you get as a student really starts and ends with lectures and I want to pick up on what Professor Turner said that really there is no university in Scotland which has cracked this are there examples of universities either in the British Isles which have managed to bridge that gap and open up the other wider aspects of the student experience and how have they done it OK, well Preston the University of Central Lancashire has attracted a number of deaf students and that's because they have a number of staff there who are deaf and they're all obviously deaf aware and those graduates, deaf graduates form the deaf community and then it's a knock on effect, domino effect and because there are a number of deaf students there and a number of deaf staff it means as you say picking back up on that point about Freshers Week deaf students new deaf students can go along knowing that there are other deaf people there who can engage with them and support them and that makes a massive difference in their socialising with hearing peers as well and I think for hearing students it gives them an opportunity to mix with a large number of deaf students and actually has benefits for them as well benefits all round Did you want to come in to reinforce that I was 10 years at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston before I came up to Edinburgh Euclans experience of working with deaf students is in book form so the knowledge is there it's available for any university in Scotland to pick up when I arrived at Harriet Watt I thought that there was an opportunity for a Scottish University to emulate that kind of provision couldn't make any headway 10 years down the line we now have something like 25 BSL users on the staff and PhD students and so on at Harriet Watt so we're doing a lot of work with the institution to say now's the time to make this an institution-wide kind of approach but I reinforce what Mark is saying that it really has to be a whole institution approach it's not enough to just say we'll bring in a few specialists here and there and they'll fix the curriculum for us thank you the second question I have did you want to come in Lauren? I just wanted to come in with on the issue of it being an institutional approach at the moment it falls upon the student bodies to help make freshers week in social life more inclusive and I think this year at Glasgow Uni we trialled a brand new freshers helper team that was aimed specifically at widening participation at your non-traditional students disabled students, mature students, care leavers and we targeted that specifically at those students so we went to, for example, events with access students marketed it through the disability service and we saw a higher up take at our welfare and social events than we've ever seen from a much wider demographic of students and I think that's great but it needs to be coming from higher up there needs to be a wider institution level that took a few of us at the student union to decide to do that but we need it to be coming from higher up so that students are aware that the university want them there and to be fully part of the student experience peer support cannot be understated and so many students who drop out site isolation is the key cause and we really need to be ensuring that it's not up to individual students on a council or a union to be including those students thank you Lauren that we've received quite a lot of calls to the help line from parents or autistic students or their parents in terms of the anxiety that they experience on their upcoming transition into university and that can be a really difficult barrier for them and the social aspect of it and the social side of it while they make up well with the academic side of it actually someone with autism could potentially find it very difficult to make that transition and Glasgow Caledonian University have a really good summer programme where they bring on a cohort of students and they introduce them to the campus and show them around and they already have people that they know when they go to start after the summer so we'd like to see a lot more of that scaled up across universities, I'm not aware of many other summer transition programmes like that thank you for that my second and final question is about attrition we've heard a lot about 20 courses and the experience that students have while they're learning having been a sabbatical myself and sitting on university court in Aberdeen this was a question I raised last week but I remember it was some 10 years ago or no, 15, 20 years ago anyway a long time ago that we had no mechanism when a student went to get an exit form from the admissions department to leave the course and leave the university there was no mechanism at that time to capture why they were leaving or to try and mitigate the reasons why they were leaving I think that was particularly compounded for students with disabilities I'd like to hear the reflections of where we are now what are the mechanisms in place so that particularly students with disabilities if they decide that they've had enough what support is there to try and re-engage them and to stop them leaving I'm not particularly aware of any mechanisms that are in place but it could be different institution wide but I know that again I've supported a lot of people on the helpline who have dropped out or at risk of dropping out for reasons related to their impairment and there's no process there's no mechanism just yesterday someone called the helpline who had been on interrupted study leave due to a mental health problem and we understand the process they weren't engaged with it they didn't provide the right evidence they've now been excluded because there was a lack of engagement a lack of system approach to find out how that support can be put in place and that's certainly the experience that we've had on the helpline but there may be different things happening in different institutions at Glasgow University as far as I'm aware reasons are recorded for why you're leaving your course and why you have to get those reasons and I think at Glasgow anyway a lot of the reason that disabled students do leave is a lack of flexibility so there's not a lot of scope for perhaps if you've finished one semester but you become ill in the second to restart at that point the next year you either have to take the whole year out or finish the year there's a lack of flexibility from switching from full time to part time study there's also the issue of the maximum time to get your degree at different universities but there is always a maximum which means that if you've had to take time out due to your health there's often a time pressure to then finish that degree which is a lot of pressure and many students just feel they'd be better off leaving than being put under that intense scrutiny and lack of flexibility about deadlines and extensions is also a massive issue at Glasgow for example if you require an extension of more than three days it's not granted in advance you have to submit evidence for a good cause and then you're not told until after the deadline whether or not that's accepted so you're leaving students with a lot of anxiety they have to decide whether or not they trust the system enough that this extension is going to be accepted before they actually miss the deadline and that leads to a lot of anxiety and many students find that the process itself is too prescriptive and rather than have to deal with the anxiety that comes along with that they're better off just dropping out and I think that's really sad because the system should be much more supportive it shouldn't be a situation where you're forced to choose between your health and your education That's a key example of these inflexible policies you know where they're indirectly discriminating against students they're not overtly they're not intentionally but you know this three day policy it cannot be applied to everybody there needs to be a consideration of how that's going to impact and especially fluctuating health conditions where they just can't they don't know how that's going to affect them If I may convener, thank you for these but if I may convener I think it would be very useful given that Lauren says that Glasgow captures reasons why or the numbers of students leaving if there was a way this committee could be furnished with the metrics around not just Glasgow but every university in Scotland so we could get a picture as to attrition particularly with students with disabilities so we could find out where the hotspots were and perhaps interrogate that further to see if there are mechanisms that universities are deploying to try and catch them before they leave I think we can absolutely do that One of the things that we heard last week from the evidence that we heard was for some lecturers they don't realise people are having difficulty until they just don't turn up and that's difficult to capture as well because you can't then pin them down to find out why they just didn't bother turning up but Dr Hutchison I was going to add that dropping out leaving is one response but it's not the only response Other outcomes are self-harm and suicide and this happens within a small minority of cases which is really something we've got to tackle Thank you Professor Turner I think the issue of the quality of evidence that's available pertains to the point you're making but actually is a much broader kind of question about what the evidence base is across all of these kinds of issues seems to me that both for BSL users and for disabled students across the board there are a number of tests that we might be wanting to kind of apply which have to do with things like actually thinking system-wide across the board is the provision that's being put in place actually of suitable quality and we talk a lot about making provision but we don't ask very much about the quality of that provision is it experienced as effective provision by the students in question and efficient in that sense that they are not the ones having to make all of the adjustments as Mark said to find interpreters and so on and lastly are we doing more than simply creating access and thinking about what it means to promote BSL use to promote disabled people's experiences as a social good Thank you Sorry Christopher Sorry, just add the experiences from Andrew's students to your question we have an academic alert system whereby a student support service is a deadline or isn't attending classes which for many departments are almost all compulsory then it's flagged up just this year they introduced a new academic alert system where our student support service are the first person the student gets contact from so if you miss lecturers or you miss tutorials the first thing you get is an email from our student support service saying look we know you've missed a couple of things is everything okay how are you doing and then they can get back in contact or with other people I myself had a health issue which was a long term one and I contacted my school to say I'm not going to attend this tutorial because I've got to go and see my doctor two days later I've got an email from the student support service saying would you register this with us so that we can then support you with that so that's been quite helpful in terms of deadlines and extensions we have a flexible deadline system so if a student has an issue we can have extendable deadlines that apply throughout their university life the third thing we do is that if a student registers with a disability through their UCAS application they then receive an email twice a year asking them if they're still okay without any support with their disability or they would like the university to step in and give them some support and there's been two students who have taken that up in their second and third years not necessarily right from the offset actually now I've got this email yeah actually I could do with this support so our support network seemed to be working fairly well we do also record leaving reasons and one last thing was that in terms of student support from the students we have a service called Nightline which is available every evening from I think about 8 o'clock at night till about 7 in the morning where students can then phone that it's a student led service so if students need support or help with anything they can just phone that number for free and we will speak to them confidentially and are trained to deal with issues and that's been certainly quite effective for us support services like that are very often inaccessible for deaf people obviously we can't phone a helpline service so they would be left without support for things like mental health, stress, anxiety, exams and a lot of those services just as good as they are are inaccessible for deaf people point made in well made well one question from me is we're obviously in December now and we were told that we would have a commissioner for widening access what do you see that role being and what should we be aiming for from that role anyone Lauren just stung them into silence I think for me I think it's really important that we would see a very broad scope of the term widening access so up until now a lot of focus on widening access has been on you know the most deprived post codes or particular schools but not necessarily disabled people adult returners and I think we need to be taking a very broad view on what widening access is so that for example as we were saying earlier that certain things will flag up as widening access issues on a UCAS forum where the moment they don't we need to see somebody who is taking a very broad view on what widening access is and also taking into consideration all the issues that intersect with each other so it's not just that you're necessarily from one of the most deprived post code areas you may also be disabled and an adult returner and these things all bring with them their own complex issues so I think we do need to be taking a very wide and intersectional view on what widening access is one of the recommendations on the report was one of the recommendations on the report it said that they understood the limits of the remit and it was around people from deprived areas or care experienced but that there needed to be more focus on other protected characteristic groups so I would like to see them delve in further and carrying out more in depth research a review across the board of what sort of support is available at university and a number of recommendations in there that are very specific to people from deprived backgrounds or care experience so I'd like to see some of those recommendations specifically extended to disabled people because they're going to benefit mutually some of them will naturally benefit disabled people as well but some of them are very specific that you have to again meet those criteria in terms of deprivation or care experience so we'd like to see some of them extended specifically for disabled people maybe from specific impairment groups and the specific barriers that they face I think the first recommendation of the blueprint is a very good one on the role of the commissioner and the line one of that reinforces the point about leading cohesive and system-wide efforts and I think that is absolutely the top line key issue Annie OK I think we're out of time now for this morning I'm thinking about our signers Mary's got a very very quick supplementary to come in with It's not a supplementary it's actually a successful issue but I think it would be useful to get the panel's views on the record and it's around the disabled students allowance because the papers quite clearly lay out the problems and the issues with accessing the disabled students allowance and I'd be keen to hear that the panel's views on in practical terms what can be done to streamline that process of applying for the allowance Is there anything that universities can do to almost bridge that gap between application and getting the allowance and are there any changes that you would like to see to the criteria because the benchmark for application seems particularly onerous and I just wondered what changes you would like to see to that I don't know much about the criteria of it specifically but an answer to what could be done is almost like a passport for it so have people coming from say school or from colleges or from wherever they're coming from before they're entering higher education to have in place an assessment and to know what requirements they need then they can take that to whichever institution they wish rather than waiting until they get to the institution and then applying and then waiting so having that first before even getting an offer of acceptance I think would be more beneficial Lauren? I agree entirely, I think if there was some sort of sector-wide guideline for DSA then we would be able to assess people much earlier and we would know the exact information that was required by every institution and it would just streamline the process so much more in terms of changes to the criteria I would definitely like to see a widening of what comes under non-medical personal help because at the moment it's not applied in the same way at every institution and I think if we could widen what students could access through that fund we could be supporting students with long-term mental health problems better sensory impairments better so I would like to see a widening of what falls under non-medical personal help Thank you Mark has given us some indication this morning about some of the challenges about having enough finance for interpreters and being able to apply to university using BSL Is there anything else Mark that you think specifically that you think we should be looking at? Okay I think a connection with DSA when deaf people need interpreting support I think having dealing with advisors who themselves are deaf and have experience of the kind of support that deaf students would need or benefit from in particular situations would be really useful because it's not just as simple as oh so you need an interpreter perhaps it's actually thinking about the type of course that that student is applying for and what would be appropriate support for them depending on the design of the cause the type of terminology that's going to be involved and so on and finding appropriate interpreters if indeed interpreters are required so I think having knowledgeable advisors engaging in that process and negotiating what's required with the student would be really hugely beneficial Thank you so much In terms of DSA and the criteria a massive problem that we're seeing is around part-time students not being able to access DSA there's a strange kind of productive rule around the minimum amount of credits or the minimum amount of time you need to be studying in order to access it learning or open university courses who maybe have very complex health conditions and doing their higher education courses over a long period of time can't access DSA and doesn't seem to be any clear policy rationale as to why that's the case Excellent point to finish on we've obviously got much more work to do and looking at this and we've got other organisations coming in next week to do that as well Can I say on behalf of the committee thank you so much for your evidence this morning it's very informative and enlightening and has given us some very clear areas to focus on so we're very grateful to you for that If you go away from committing you think I should have said that, I should have told them this please get back in touch with us we'll be happy to hear from you all again in the course of the work that we are doing but if I can say thank you so much on behalf of the committee thank you I'm going to go into private session now to go into private for the committee so I'm going to suspend the committee now thank you