What is the project?
This project is a partnership between the School of Human and Health Sciences, the Disability Co-ordinators in Support Services, and the disability support services in the Library. The funding for the project comes from the Teaching Quality Enhancement Fund (TQEF), a Government initiative via the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). TQEF funding is designed to enable, or incentivise, enhancements in Higher Education. The project partners applied for this funding to improve the support for disabled students, using the funding to create the extra time needed to enable staff to take a closer look at the student experience. It is crucial to the project to identify, from the current student experience, what students find helpful and what could be done better.
The project aims to provide evidence based, effective learning support for students entering the university with a disability through:
Students enter the School of Human and Health Sciences with a range of impairments. While a larger percentage of our students request support in relation to dyslexia, our students also request support in relation to mobility, epilepsy, Aspergers’ syndrome, sensory impairment and mental health. A robust structure of support is available from academic and support staff for all of these students, underpinned by national guidelines (HEFCE 2002). The University of Huddersfield’s provision of support for disabled students has been praised in a Major Review of DOH funded provision. Prior to this project, there had been no robust evaluation of the provision of support and only anecdotal evidence was available to validate the success of this strategy. TQEF project 1d aims to provide this evaluation.
The project aims to embed best practice into learning, teaching and assessment needs through dedicated, focused training and support materials.
This project aims to ‘support success and progression for students with diverse needs‘ (HEFCE para. 18) and meets 3 of the 4 TQEF criteria: