ADHD & SpLD Support Without a Formal Assessment at De Montfort University
Reading 15th June 14:05-14:45
Rachel Davies
Tina Sharpe
In common with many institutions, at DMU we have experienced an increase in students seeking assessment for ADHD over recent years, and students often don’t seek support from us until their final year: this failure to access disability support early in a programme occurs across the sector including internationally (Lightner et al, 2012).
Historically our university has paid for and arranged SpLD and ADHD assessments when a student would then be able to access DSA funded support. However, final year students accessing an ADHD or SpLD assessment rarely managed to complete the DSA application process in time for support to be useful.
In order to address this issue, we devised a package of ADHD and SpLD support that could be delivered by the Disability team, as an alternative to undertaking a formal ADHD/SpLD assessment and then applying for DSA. Students could access the package when they had attended an ADHD or SpLD screening appointment with a Disability Officer, and either ADHD or an SpLD was considered likely. The support package consisted of:
• Access to a workshop programme delivered by SpLD specialists;
• 10 hours of individual mentoring or study skills support;
• An assistive technology tutorial aimed at enabling students to access the wide range of assistive technology offered by Library & Learning Services.
Our proposed workshop outlines the results of this pilot project, and seeks to open debate about the wider issues raised by its results:
1. When we remove the need for “evidence” of a disability it reduces the barriers to accessing support and this is likely to have a positive impact on students who face barriers in accessing diagnostic services. However, without “evidence” then how can we be sure that the support we are offering is appropriate or helpful, or even reasonable?
2. When we removed the evidence/DSA application barrier to students accessing ADHD and SpLD support in their final year we expected that this would improve access of support amongst this group significantly. The results of our pilot weren’t quite what we’d expected. How can we address the additional organisational barriers that students with ADHD and SpLDs face in booking and attending support sessions?
3. Why do we have a national system of disability support (DSA) that is so unwieldy and difficult to access (Holmes, 2022; Disabled Students’ Commission, 2022) that institutions and students are forced to find ways to circumvent the system, rather than use it?
References
Disabled Students’ Commission (2022) Disabled Students’ Commission Annual Report 2021-2022, Advance-HE
Holmes, C. (2022) Report Into The Disabled Students’ Allowance (DSA) https://lordchrisholmes.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Lord-Holmes-DSA-Report-April-22.pdf accessed 21.4.22
Kirsten L. Lightner, Deborah Kipps-Vaughan, Timothy Schulte, Ashton D. Trice, (2012) Reasons University Students with a Learning Disability Wait to Seek Disability Services, Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability, 25(2), 145 – 159145