The Office for Students' Statement of Expectation and the Disabled Students Commitment have given UK universities a clear framework for supporting disabled students. But having a framework and actually embedding it into day-to-day delivery are two very different things.
We sat down with Grant McNeill, Symplicity's EMEA Director of Client Success and Strategy, to get his take on where universities are in this journey, where the real challenges lie, and what it takes to close the gap.
One of the most consistent things Grant hears from institutions is that there's no single baseline. Some universities have formally signed up to the Disabled Students Commitment and have institution-wide backing. Others are doing genuinely excellent work, but it's concentrated in pockets.
"There's great work that happens, but it happens in pockets a lot of the time," Grant says. "Maybe it's happening with the disability support team or student services, but it's not embedded into curriculum, and academics aren't part of it. The challenge is putting all that together in a cohesive way so that everyone's on board."
Universities like Hertfordshire, Derby, and London South Bank have been leading the way. ⤵️
One of the most important shifts Grant points to isn't about adding more support services. It's about rethinking the student experience from the ground up.
"It's about accessibility, not about disability support," he explains. "All students come with something. A mature student raising children alongside study has challenges just as valid as a student with a physical disability. So the question becomes: how do you make the student journey work for everybody?"
That means asking harder questions about curriculum design and assessment. Instead of bolting on accommodations like extended exam time or reader writers, universities are starting to ask whether they could simply change how students are assessed in the first place.
Universities are under real pressure on staffing, and that's shaping what they need from their systems. Manual processes that once took three people are no longer sustainable.
"Universities are losing staff, so they need systems and processes that are super robust and don't need lots of human handling," Grant says. "Things that used to be done manually on a spreadsheet need to be automated."
But there's another pressure coming. As new regulatory metrics emerge, similar to the B3 framework, the OfS will expect universities to be able to evidence how they're supporting disabled students, and to do it quickly.
"What happens if the OfS came knocking next Wednesday and wanted a full set of reports and stats on how you're supporting students with disabilities?" Grant asks.
"Would a university be able to pull all that straight away? Or would they scramble around calling meetings and trying to gather information? That's the challenge. They're all doing great work, but how do they measure what they're doing, and how quickly can they measure it?"
Symplicity's Accommodate (Access) platform is built to help with exactly this.
By putting reasonable adjustments in place earlier in the student journey, universities can prevent issues from escalating, reduce the staff time spent on complaints and follow-up, and most importantly, improve the experience for students.
"If a student has a complaint and it's dealt with quickly, that stops the escalation," Grant says. "The better the experience for the student, the more likely they are to stay. Universities have a massive challenge where large proportions of students start a degree and drop out. If those students had the right support, they could progress through to their second and third year. Financially, that's huge, because then universities don't need to scramble to recruit new students. It's about investing in the students they've actually recruited."
If there's one thing universities can do to close the gap between policy and practice, Grant says it comes back to a shift in mindset.
"Think holistically. Don't think about disabled students as a separate entity. Ask whether your systems, your processes, your buildings, your assessments, your teaching, everything, is accessible to students."
And on the practical side: automate what can be automated, give staff time back to actually work with students, and make sure your reporting data is accurate and accessible quickly. Not just for the OfS, but so you can see what's working and act on it.