 Good morning and welcome to this, the 10th meeting of the Equality and Human Rights Committee. The usual make sure your mobile phones on flight mode or switched to silent please. We're moving into agenda item 1 which is our draft budget scrutiny for 2017-2018. And just to remind people that this Saturday, the 3rd of December is international day of persons with disabilities and this promotes a UN convention on the rights of persons with basically disability, so today's evidence is very typical indeed in timely because our focus today is about accessing universities and the way in access agenda for people with disabilities people use Ms, SL, and this morning, I'm with a number of student groups and organisations around the table and we have, as we can see, people who will be using British Sign Language this morning. Panel y maen nhw, ac rymdyn ni'n ddweud i gilydd, yn Mark McMillan, mae sy'n ddweud â unig ddechrau ar gyfer i ddechrau. Dr Ian Hutchison, mae byr cymdeithasol yn Ysbethysgolach. Professor Graham Turner yn ysbethysgolachol, yn ysgolchau i'r adri, i'r transgluadau i'r ddechrau i'r ddechrau, yn ysbethysgolach, yn ysgolach i'r ddechrau i'r ddechrau i'r ddechrau. Llorin McDougall is a student in disability officer i ddechrau ar gyfer unig ddechrau i'r ddechrau. Rebecca Scarlett, senior policy and information officer, with lead and last but not least, is Christopher Wilde, the widened access and participation officer at St Andrews 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 are doing, we are looking at the Scottish Government's budget, we are looking at a specific aspect of that budget, widening access. So we have 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 were 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 am quite happy to open up if you would be quite keen to put on to record your thoughts and feelings about your experiences. I see that Lauren is nodding her head so 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 are 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, I think, across the board from everybody. One of the things that could help with that would be more advice on perhaps UCAS, links to organisations who can support students with applications. That would definitely 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 are at university. One thing that I would like to see would be more consistency. There is 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, sorry, as I go here just to make sure that I am highlighting some of the key issues. One of the biggest issues, I think, especially for students at Glasgow, is that you cannot apply for disabled students allowance until you are registered and you have accepted a place. That can create a lot of anxiety at the beginning of the semester when you do not have any support in place at all. That can be everything from assistive software to non-medical personal help. There is massive waiting lists sometimes into the second semester in order to get that 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 do not have those reasonable adjustments in place yet. It is a massive issue for student confidence, but it is also a massive issue for retention. A lot of students spend that first semester at university already a bit worried that they have made that leap. Without those reasonable adjustments in place, it can be very difficult to convince students that it will get better and that they need to stick it out. There needs to be more of a focus on getting DSA applications in before the start of the semester. Once you have an offer, if there was a more standard procedure across the sector, it would not matter which institution you were attending, you could apply for your DSA before you got there. For me, that is a pretty massive issue. 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 is a leading on from that application stage to when you are at university. I am labelled here as Disability History Scotland, which I am very involved with, but the experience that I was trying to convey in my submission was through university teaching, so it is more with that hat on. Over the years, I have encountered so many students with impairing situations, with different levels of support and different opportunities to access that support. I find that it is 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 is not always appreciation among staff of the experiences that students with an impairment are going through, and that is a big issue. That gets on to identification, bearing in mind that there are people with impairments who do not want to self-identify, and that is their right, their privilege to do that. They have many reasons for doing that, but you can quite often, at the beginning of a term, sit down with a new seminar group and look around you. The chances are that there will be at least one student in that group who will be experiencing some type of difficulty impairment-related. It is never the one that you think it might be. Identification is a big difficulty. I would say that, if you are looking about what investment should go into higher education to improve those situations, we are looking at education of staff, not just teaching staff but all the contact staff that students might come in contact with, so that they have a wider understanding. I think that some types of impairments, many types of impairments, are like other conditions. I am sure that the ladies will say that you do not really know what childbirth is like until you have gone through it. You do not know what having cancer or being close to someone with cancer, what life is like until you have gone through it. I think that that is the same sort of thing. Education, but in addition to that, ability to empathise is also very important. Those 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 have problems and inverted commas, you should not be here, which is totally wrong. That does exist to them. That would be worrying. Is it your experience that the teaching staff who are good at dealing with it are the ones who are always left to deal with it? I have taught at a number of universities, so I have a bit of a cross-section of experience. The common guideline for teaching staff is not to get involved with students with those particular issues, to refer them on to the specialist, to the counselling services, to the disability service. However, there are quite a lot of students who, for a variety of reasons, are not accessing those services. Quite often, it is the teaching staff that are their first port of call. They are getting to know you through the course of a module and they come to you. I have always had a big problem of saying that you cannot really talk to me about that. You need to go to such and such. I refer them to those specialist services, but I always feel that an obligation is their own word. I just feel that it is the right thing that you have to give them as much time as they need to talk about things and to explain the difficulties. We all understand that, but getting to one of the specialist services, I think that maybe we could bring Mark in at this point. If a student has an impairment or a disability or, in this case, maybe hearing loss, what kind of actions would be taken to support them once they have been signposted by that thoughtful teacher? 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. Compared to other disabilities, perhaps with sight loss or other disabilities, it is very different. Our number one barrier is communication. I feel that we really need to look at the funding for deaf people to go through university. I feel that DSA is not enough of a support for deaf students. My reasons for that, I would like to explain, is similar to the other submissions. When deaf students go to universities, they need interpreters for lecturers, working groups, seminars and so on, and also socially to be able to have a full university experience. DSA funding is only £21,000 a year, which means that a British Sign Language interpreter or a British Sign Language user like me can only afford to fund one interpreter. If they are lucky, they may also get a note-taker, but I really feel that that is not sufficient. 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 lecturer who had to interpret for three hours without stopping. That really was not 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, take turns and ensure high quality. In university, there was only one interpreter working for long periods on their own. That is an issue. Also, around 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 lunch room in a social situation with no communication at all. Trying to mix with other students as a deaf person using a pen and paper was just so difficult. That is not how deaf people usually communicate. We use sign language, so having no kind of support there was not helpful in my experience. I think that DSA needs to be reviewed so that there is enough funding for enough interpreters to really support deaf people through the whole university experience. For me, working as an employment adviser, access to work to support is there to help people to do their jobs. They can be funded up to £40,000 a year and, in my role, I use interpreters for meetings, phone calls and so on. However, in universities around £20,000 a year are 30 hours a week of interpreting, so we need more interpreting in university for deaf students. Also linked to that, things such as social events. I know that a lot of hearing people when they go to university go because they want to learn, but they also want to have that social experience. They want to develop their social skills, and I do not feel that deaf people have that same kind of opportunity. I will tell you about my own example. In freshers week, when I arrived at university as a new student, you know what it is like to have those two weeks of meeting people and getting used to the university experience. However, 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 had 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 had not met anyone yet. It would be good for universities to look at those kind of social events like freshers week, because university needs to be more than just learning, it is building confidence, it is socialising, and it is learning together. I feel that that is an important issue. If I can also add what I would love to see in university, more staff who advise disabled students that are deaf themselves, which would mean that they would have the empathy that was mentioned by Rebekah earlier, I feel that at the moment there are 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 do not have that experience themselves. That would be so good for deaf students to have someone deaf to speak to at university. If universities could try to recruit more deaf staff or 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. When they meet deaf and disabled students to have that real empathy, they would have the full picture and the full information that they would be able to offer really helpful advice. Mary, I think that 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. I would be interested in your views on whether reasonable adjustments mean that an assessment is done at application stage or is the assessment process something that is revisited regularly? Whatever supports are put in place at the beginning may not be the supports that people need on an on-going basis. Is there a capacity to look at changes to the support package and changes to what adjustments are made? How much dialogue is there between the person who requires the adjustments and the person who is making the adjustments? With a lot of information on reasonable adjustment and how that can be done, so maybe you are best to start answering Mary's question. Yes, absolutely. I am not based in a university and I think that each university will have different processes of how they approach that and I think that absolutely there is the capacity to go back and review the assessment and what is in place. The issue lies with the emphasis on the student. The ability to speak up and to say that 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 is not to say that an assessment can't be a reassessment and they can't change the adjustments that are in place but in my opinion there is not enough constant dialogue, there is not enough of a process where a disabled student can go and access that advice on a regular basis, the emphasis and the honours on them to approach and I think that 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 themselves. 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 that 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, so 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 there's sometimes a real lack of communication between the disability services and the academic staff. We 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 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, I've given advice to a number of students in the last couple of weeks 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 of how that is communicated to the academic staff. However, 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 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 and there maybe needs to 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, a 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 kind 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. 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 needs 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. 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. 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 that 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 disability markers and so on that were not taken into account. I would just like to ask if each of you has an experience that you could tell us about the difficulty in getting in the door in the first place. Christopher, I was wondering if that was maybe a point that you would come in just given your experience at St Andrew's. 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 that 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 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 that 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, there's a whole what Lorne was saying right at the beginning about disability disabled students allowance. The assessment centres take about four to six months. We've got two students currently who are waiting on support, and that's going to take probably till about next May, which is almost at exam time for the end of their first year, where they've 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 don't have and can't provide, but there's no funding for it because it's taking almost a year for the students to get funding and support, which is a huge challenge for them, and that's causing a lot of stress for people. We were coming up to exam period now at university, and those people haven't had any support for the entire first semester, and the university are trying to compensate for that, but there's limits to what the university can do. Add to that in terms of the application process, just echo in what I put in the written submission, is that there's not really enough opportunity to sometimes be able to disclose enough information that might potentially support an application. You've seen from the commission on widening access around contextual information, but that's 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 can't relocate, they can't travel, they can't 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 can't 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, it is already starting a little bit late in the process. For BSL-using students, the issue started much earlier, for example in respect of raising the aspiration to attend university at all in the first place. 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, yeah, 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. So 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. 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 the shortage of appropriate interpreters. Therefore, we need to set a series of targets over a period of time, put 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 that 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 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. 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 engaged with the deaf community and tried to engage with the community and attract them and get them interested in higher education, that would be really valuable. I know that some universities are very good and proactive about considering applications and thinking about what needs to be done. Others are not, and 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 the 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. Support to what Rebecca said earlier regarding contextual information. I think that one of the biggest issues that we hear about from applicants is not being able to explain perhaps gaps in education, gaps in employment. I think that 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 not very long and to fit into that short piece why you have perhaps been out of education or why you have been out of employment, it does not leave a lot of space for the other things that you need to cram into that very, very small statement. I think that there needs to be a space for more contextual information to be provided. I also think that one of the biggest anxieties that 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 are 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 really struggle with knowing what they can ask for. I do not think that they should be on the student to know what sort of support is available before they get to university. I think that there needs to be a lot more robust pre-entry advice that would help to alleviate some of that anxiety for applicants. I want to stick with the mysterious contextual information that has to be supplied by students before they get in the door. The example that Rebecca Ewing 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 that 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 that information is taken into account and must be taken into account? The issue is that it is not going to be taken into account. That is what we are saying, that there are widening access markers but they are 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. As Lauren said, 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 is going to have. At the moment, that is not an opportunity necessarily to be able to disclose. The 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 would be given special preference. However, the Equality Act says that it is 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. We are not saying that they need to lower the entry requirements but that if they have that minimum or more, there are 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 is one student that comes to particular mind here. This is a young woman who had done an undergraduate degree and completed it and applied for a postgraduate study. In that instance, she had to attend an interview. 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 do not know anyway a disfavour, but that is the impression that I gained. The student said to me after it, well, it is obviously not to be. I said, look, do you really want to do postgraduate study? She said, I would love to do it. I said, let's look for other options, different courses, different institutions. She was limited, as Rebecca highlighted, in terms of where she could do that, but there were some options open to her. I am pleased to say that she applied 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 have 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. I think that 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. I think that in the context that we are talking about here, there are a wide range of really exciting things that we could do at a higher educational level and, indeed, throughout the educational system to promote the use of BSL. Just in the context that we are here, we are 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 is what I will bring to the university, not what I will take from you, not what I need from you. It 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 another separate point? Jeremy, can we have your questions next? Good morning again. Thank you very much for coming. I have got three questions, which kind of vary, but before that, I wanted just to thank Mark, particularly for his statement. I mean, I think the whole issue around, outside the course, freshers week, what happens in the evening, at the union, whatever, I think is really important and I think it's something we need to go away and reflect on. I'm not asking a question on that, but I didn't want to lose it in the importance of what we've said. I'll bring 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 very 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'll have a less good experience. So have universities better set up for some disabilities compared to others, or is that a pretty standard thing? Christopher, 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 just that 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, which is something that we're going to look at as a students association, but generally for most students once that support is there, that seems to be quite acceptable, and that seems to work well for them. Mary was asking a lot about changing of that and how that, if they need it altered, seems to be very easy once that's there. The university seems to provide a lot of support, and the students seem generally very happy with that. In terms of a hierarchy of 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 the mental health disability in 2009. There's now 320. Part of that has been education about educating students. We now have a mental health week. We had a masculinity and mental health event last night, so that is improving that. In terms of support, once it's in place, once the disability 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. I'm not sure whether or not there's a hierarchy, but there are certainly 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. At Glasgow, the disability service has seen a real rise in students registering with mental health problems and with long-term chronic health issues. Those pose more difficulty with providing reasonable adjustments because they tend to be a lot more individualised. 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. That is what you will get. For students who perhaps have more complex needs, there are more difficulty longer waiting lists and maybe not as much information about the support that's available, particularly with mental health issues. I think that it's probably across the sector that counselling and psychological services are chronically underfunded and students with kind of long-term mental health conditions are often, 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 waiting lists can be months long. It can cause a lot of problems. With the non-medical personal health part of DSA, some students get mentoring support that falls under mental health and counselling support, but it's not consistent. If students were able 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 that could certainly be something to be looked into. I wonder if I can—oh sorry, did you want to come in, Professor? Maire, 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. Too many experiences 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? 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 at a very pan-disabilities approach, and our employment service, for example, employment advice is very pan-disability, and universities have a pan-disability approach. I feel that that has 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. That's why I really strongly feel that we need someone with experience of being deaf, of using interpreters, so that the appropriate support can be put in place. 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 that 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 or is there not a kind of hierarchy, I think that 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 they're 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 those, particularly upon arrival at university, so that brings another aspect into the overall problems and needs that they're having to address. We're finding in this inquiry how many layers there is when it comes to supporting people properly. Jeremy, do you want to come back? Just a couple of quick questions, if 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, are you going to be careful, 80s isn't so much longer ago, but 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. He succeeded against all the advice that he was being given to the contrary, not to raise his sights too high. I think that 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 are interacting with, the able-bodied people that they are interacting with. It does still get back to problems of education, of understanding, of empathy. I think that those problems still exist, maybe not to the extent that they existed 100 years ago or even 50 years ago, but they still exist. We are being told that 20 per cent 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 that they encounter, the aspirations that they have, and to see them as people and not just as a disability. My final question is to Christopher, and I appreciate that you are not here to represent me in university, you represent the Christian Union. It was interesting that I was talking to my nephew, who graduated last year from St Andrews, and my niece, who is just a first-year at St Andrews. I said to him that perhaps St Andrews has not got the best record for disabled students, and the immediate response was that we are in a historic building, how can we make these adaptions? Do you think that some of the old universities, like St Andrews, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen, use that as an excuse? When we talk about reasonable adaptions, do they say, well, we have an 18th or 19th century building, we cannot adjust it, so we just won't do anything at all? Do you think that that is 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? Aspects of that that we might find difficult to answer. Certainly, students have had challenges with getting access to buildings. There are some buildings at St Andrews where people who have issues with fatigue, for example, where a student with ME who couldn't access and was asked to go to a tutorial five stories up, say that it wasn't possible for them. There are some buildings that are simply not accessible. However, what we have is almost all the buildings are accessible on some level, so even where we have, say, 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 years down the road there's another building with rooms in it, so what the university tends to do is to move whole tutorials. If they're aware of a disability and aware of a mobility issue into any of those 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, while we've been in this room for the past 15 years, we're not moving now. The university got involved with that and eventually managed to deal with it, but it did take about eight or nine weeks. There's no doubt about it that we can accommodate students with access to buildings that are inaccessible, because we have alternatives, but there are still issues with it in terms of how much staff will try and adjust. The balance between what you were saying about reasonable adjustments, how much 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 that we're trying to work at. 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. 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'd struggled up four flights of stairs and I was horrified, but her response was, well, you know, it took me a wee while, it was a bit painful, but I didn't want to make an issue of it. That's again one of these situations where the student was undertaking discomfort, which shouldn't have occurred. I'd just like to add to that 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 they couldn't, you know, the button was broken in terms of, you know, opening the doors and there wasn't anybody available and the lecture theatre wasn't accessible, so they immediately wrote that school 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, I don't want to have to push this, so it's not mainstreamed enough, it's not inclusive enough, but there are things that, you know, ancient universities will do in terms of the building access. So do you think, Rebecca, that there should be a much more pre-emptive attitude? Absolutely. 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, the 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 that 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. I think one of the other issues with physical accessibility that people tend to forget is that some of those 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. Yeah, 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? Yeah, I just wanted to add that we need to remember that physical disability and physical barriers are not only for the barriers that we encounter, they're attitudinal barriers, and they can be as big or worse than the physical barriers that you experience. My experience is shared with a lot of other students who are going to lectures and asking for lecturers if it's possible that they have a short break because you've only got one interpreter working there, and it's also 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 are saying, no, 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 or something, but then they forget. So these attitudinal barriers really need to be addressed. 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 for the students who would be in those situations with the deaf student. 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 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. Thank you. 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. In particular, I was very struck by your initial testimony about your experience of things like Freshers' Week. Jeremy touched on that as well, but I have some specific questions about that. I think that the student experience is something that universities seek to market. It's not just the course or the quality of the qualifications that they have to offer, but it's the student experience. I know from myself visiting a number of universities that it was really that feel and that vibe and that social side of things which swung my choice. I'm notwithstanding that the other universities wouldn't have me. That student experience is absolutely key. 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. Professor Turner said that there is no university in Scotland that would just crack this. Are there examples of universities, either in the British Isles or overseas, which have managed to bridge that gap and open up the other wider aspects of the student experience? How have they done it? 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. Those deaf graduates inform the deaf community and then it's a knock-on effect, domino effect. Because there are a number of deaf students there and a number of deaf staff, it means that, as you say, picking back up on that point about Freshers' Week, 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 and it also makes a massive difference in their socialising with hearing peers as well. I think that 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 around. I was 10 years at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston before I came up to Edinburgh. Euclan's experience of working with deaf students is in book form. The knowledge is there and available for any university in Scotland to pick up. When I arrived at Heriot-Watt, I thought that there was an opportunity for a Scottish university to emulate that kind of provision. I couldn't make any headway at Heriot-Watt at that point 10 years ago. 10 years down the line, we now have something like 25 BSL users on the staff and PhD students and so on at Heriot-Watt and so we're doing a lot of work with the institution to say, okay, 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 and the second question I have or 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 had, we trialled a brand new freshers helper team that was aimed specifically at widening participation so it was aimed 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 a 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. I'm sorry quickly that we've received quite a lot of calls to the helpline from parents or from 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 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. 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 in the summer after the summer so we'd like to see a lot more of that scale 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 access and getting into 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 that I raised last week but I remember that 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 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. 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. 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, because they didn't fully understand the process, they weren't engaged with it, they didn't provide the right evidence, and 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, but there's not necessarily intervention put in place to try and mitigate those reasons. I think that 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 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, which is different 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 that they'd be better off leaving than being put under that intense scrutiny. 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. 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. 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 where they're indirectly discriminating against students. They're not overtly, they're not intentionally, but this three-day policy cannot be applied to everybody. There needs to be a consideration of how that's going to impact students with complex and especially fluctuating health conditions where they just can't, they don't know how that's going to affect them. If I may convene it, thank you for these, but if I may convene it, 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 that 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 to catch them before they leave. I think that 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 that people are having difficulty until they just don't turn up. 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. 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 that we've got to tackle. Professor Turner. I think that the issue of the quality of evidence that's available pertains to the point that 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. It 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 are we 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 the adjustments and make all the phone calls as Mark said to find interpreters and so on? 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? We have an academic alert system whereby if a student misses 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 is the first person that the student gets contact from. If you miss lectures or you miss tutorials, the first thing that you get is an email from our student support service saying, look we know that you've missed a couple of things, is everything okay, how are you doing and then they can get back in contact with the student support service 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 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 and they get a plan set up, we can have extendable deadlines that apply then 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, where they've thought well it was okay up to now but actually now I've got this email, yeah actually I could do with this support. To our support now we seem 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 eight o'clock at night till about seven 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 they can get in touch with students who will speak to them confidentially and are trained to deal with issues and that's been certainly quite effective for us. At this point 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 inaccessible for deaf people. One question from me is but obviously in December now 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? I think for me 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 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 form where at the moment they don't so I think we need to see somebody who's 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 in the report 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. There are also 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 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 that is absolutely the the top line key issue. 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. It's not a supplementary, it's actually a definite 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 till 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 would be more beneficial. Yeah, Lauren. Yeah, I agree entirely. I think if there was some sort of sector wide guideline for 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 with sensory impairments better so I would like to see a widening of what falls under non-medical personal help. 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 that specifically that you think we should be looking at? Okay, I think in 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 course 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. 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 so people especially people doing distance 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 been both very informative and enlightening and is given as 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 so we're happy to hear from you all again on the course of the work that we are doing but if I can say thank you so much on behalf of the committee. I'm going to go into private session now for allow us to go into private for the committee so I'm going to suspend committee now. Thank you.