Disabilities, Specific Learning Difficulties (SpLD’s) and Long-Term Health Conditions

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00:01 Hello, my name is Lia Harness. I'm the Learner Support Manager at Open College of the Arts and I'm going to talk to you a little bit about studying with disabilities at OCA.

00:13 Some of the things that we're going to cover are who can access support, a little bit about Disabled Students' Allowance, which a lot of our students are eligible for and apply for, the Learner Support team, which is the team that I look after, reasonable adjustments, which is how we can help you with your studies, and OCA's Disability Support Form, which is how you can help us and your department to understand a little bit more about how best to support you.

00:42 The type of course you are studying will determine what support options you may have. So for degree students, undergraduates, and those on our Certificate of Higher Education courses, students in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland may be able to access some additional support through Disabled Students' Allowance, also referred to as DSA, via their funding body. For students on foundations courses, short courses, or international students, DSA is unfortunately not available.

01:12 But please do talk to us in Learner Support about your needs and any reasonable adjustments that may be beneficial for your studies.

01:21 So DSA eligibility is determined by the appropriate funding body, and you must be UK-based and meet the Student Finance funding criteria for your funding body, whether that's Student Finance England, for example, or Wales. You must have a disability, mental health condition, specific learning difficulty, or long-term health condition that impacts study. And you'd need to also provide relevant evidence to DSA.

01:49 So this may be a GP letter, consultant report, or a diagnostic assessment for dyslexia or autism. It is not means-tested. Support is awarded based on your needs and not your household income. So it doesn't ordinarily affect your benefits in the way that a maintenance loan would, for example.

02:15 We would encourage you to apply well in advance of your chosen intake. Student Finance reports that the full process can take up to 14 weeks sometimes. You need to use the DSA1 full form to apply. Part-time students will usually be directed to a short form, but for distance learning students, you must be using the DSA1 full form. This will also ask your university to complete section 5.

02:43 However, DSA do need more information from distance learning providers such as ourselves and the OU than the form actually requests. So you can submit that section blank and we will be contacted directly by DSA to provide course information. DSA will then confirm that you're eligible and you'll be asked to arrange a needs assessment and told how you can arrange that. This meeting can be conducted either online or sometimes in person locally, depending on where you are and what works for you.

03:12 The meeting isn't a test. A lot of people have anxiety about something called a needs assessment through other experiences. However, at this point, you've already been deemed eligible. This is a meeting to find out how best to support you. So the assessor is someone who knows all about support and they will ask you questions to understand what your needs are. So if you are not sure already what might benefit you, or if it's been a long time since you've been in study, do not worry.

03:39 They will ask you questions and guide you through to find the information that they need. So they might ask what support has helped you before, if you have been studying recently, or if you have any difficulties with organisation, time management, reading, and research, for example. They'll provide recommendations based on your needs, and you're not obligated to accept all of their suggestions if it's something that you don't feel will work for you or something that you've tried before.

04:06 You don't have to take everything that they recommend for you. It is a dialogue. They'll be working with you to get the right support in place. And then after the assessment, the assessor will draft a report outlining what their recommendations are. And you can have this sent to you for checking before it goes to your funding body as well. So do request that if that's something that you think would be beneficial for you.

04:31 And then also, if you're comfortable, please allow your assessor to share the report with us at OCA. Otherwise, they won't do that. And it will often include recommendations for us, and it will help us to understand how best to support you.

04:47 We do speak to a lot of students who are not sure how DSA can help them or whether it's going to be useful to them. So DSA is specifically to meet your disability-related support needs for your studies. So in most cases, it isn't payments made to the student; it's support awarded, and an agreed provider will arrange it. So it can cover things like ergonomic equipment such as chairs, keyboard, mouse—that sort of thing.

05:16 It can also cover non-medical help like one-to-one support. For example, a student with dyslexia might receive dictation software to help with writing or read-aloud software for reading and research. A student with ADHD might have a specialist one-to-one study skills tutor to help with strategies for studying with ADHD. A student with depression or anxiety might have help from a specialist mental health mentor. All support is individual.

05:45 DSA will not cover day-to-day disability-related costs that you would have if you were not studying, such as personal care services. It doesn't include any general costs that a student might have either, such as if you need photography software for your course, or paints, art materials, and general printing. It would not cover those as all students are expected to have those kinds of costs.

06:12 It may, however, cover additional costs. So if you need to print more due to your disability, for example, to help with proofreading, then it may cover the costs of that, whereas it wouldn't cover regular printing costs. So after your assessment and your report has been reviewed to see what support is agreed for you, you'll receive a DSA2 award letter, and this details all of the support you've been awarded, who the supplier or provider is, and how you can contact them.

06:41 So you should contact each of the providers listed to arrange your support. This could be delivery of equipment or setting up your one-to-one support sessions. DSA only covers costs arising from disability, as we mentioned, and one thing that they do expect all students need these days is a computer.

07:09 For this reason, if you don't have a computer and you are awarded software, they will award a computer or laptop, but they do ask for you to then contribute the first £200 towards this because, again, they expect a computer or laptop is required by all students now. If your household income is under £25,000 or if you receive a low-income benefit such as Universal Credit, Housing Benefit, or Council Tax Benefit, then OCA has a Learner Support scheme which can cover the £200 contribution, subject to available funds remaining,

07:37 and you can see more information on our website under the Learner Support scheme.

07:45 There are five members across the Learner Support team altogether, so we are quite a small team, and you'll speak to us for various things either before you study or during your studies. We work really closely with all teams at OCA. So we work really closely with the curriculum development team to try and ensure that courses are inclusive and accessible. We work with the assessment team to try and ensure that things are clear to students, you know, and how we can make improvements.

08:17 If you have any questions about support, concerns about your studies, or want some help applying for DSA, then please do get in touch with us. I'm going to pop some contact details on at the end, and there'll be a separate page with links and email addresses and things as well that you can see. We can help you apply for DSA at any time as well, I would just add. If you decide you don't want to apply for it right now, but later in your studies things change and you do want to apply for it then,

08:45 you know, we can explain and help you do that.

08:51 Before I talk to you about reasonable adjustments, I'm just going to cover a little bit about what study at OCA looks like, because in a lot of cases, the requests that we get from students in terms of reasonable adjustments are actually things that you can just have. We do try and make the courses as accessible as we can, you know, up front and from the outset to kind of reduce the need for you to get in touch and request particular things. So it's designed to be flexible.

09:18 There aren't any kind of live lectures that you might need to attend. So everything is either, you know, within your course. There are recorded things. There are some live sessions that you can attend. They are entirely optional. So if you can attend them, great, do that. If you can't attend them, there's always an alternative way of doing that.

09:48 So if it's a group session that you might want to come and share about your work, there'll also be an option to do that through the forum or similar for students who either can't or don't want to attend a live group session. So that's all on OCA Learn, which is our virtual learning environment. There are accessible course materials. So everything is on OCA Learn for you.

10:16 Unless you're a student with a full ICT exemption, then most of you will be working on the virtual learning environment. However, you can adjust the format of that as well. So you can have audio formats, you can have even electronic Braille, and we can provide accompanying printed versions of the course as well. So if you need it in a different font size, a particular font, or even a different coloured paper—for some students who have dyslexia and need it on a different coloured paper—we can send that out to you as well.

10:42 There are flexible tasks, so although there are exercises and projects within your degree course or your foundations course—whatever you're studying with us—they are flexible. So there is a route given there for you to kind of meet your learning outcomes. But if for some reason that's not workable for you, then there are usually built-in options for you. So one of the examples I mentioned before was attending a live group session and things where there's a forum option. There may be other things as well.

11:12 So if you're asked to go to an exhibition or a gallery, it'll usually say in there alternatives that you could do online if, for example, you're not able to get out and about and can't leave the home.

11:24 Now, we say you can study on your schedule. That means that you can study when it's convenient for you. So there are timeframes that you have to meet, especially if you're on a degree course. There are timeframes usually attached to your funding and things like that. But you can set that however you want. So a unit on the degree is around 400 learning hours in most cases. And you can do that in whatever way works best for you. So sometimes we have students who are only working at the weekend.

11:53 Sometimes we have students who maybe are teachers and they don't have as much free time in term time, but they get quite a lot done in the half terms. However, you can fit the hours in around your life, around your circumstances. You can do that, and you can agree the submission dates with your tutor as you go along. There is step-by-step learning. So there are exercises, research projects that will gradually build up into your assignment work, and you submit that to your tutor for feedback, which is formative feedback.

12:23 So your tutor will give you feedback that you can then act on, you know, and you're not assessed on it until the end of the unit. So your tutor will give you feedback and tell you what's worked well, what you might want to revisit, what changes and improvements you might want to consider. And you've got the opportunity to do that before you're assessed if you're a degree student being assessed. There are flexible deadlines. So as I've mentioned, you can negotiate those with your tutor.

12:51 If you're going to complete your unit within the original timeframe, then you can negotiate however you like with your tutor. If you find that you need more time, then we'll come to that. You can apply for extensions, or our team can help with extensions as well. And then if your tutor doesn't hear from you for a while—because obviously we want you to work flexibly, we want you to work on your time, but that may mean that you go quiet at times—your tutor may just ask us to get in touch with you and check in to see if you're okay, if you've missed a deadline or something.

13:26 So I did mention tutor feedback, and you can have that in different forms depending on what's best for you, what your support needs are, and what the work is, you know, and how it would best work for that. So if you think you'll get most from a video call, a sort of live one-to-one where you can be asking questions, then you can arrange those with your tutor. If the thought of that fills you with dread and you would rather just have a written report that you can look over, that's absolutely fine, or a mixture of the two.

13:53 We've put "no exams"—there is obviously assessment, but there are no kind of exams where you sit and take a timed exam and have to submit something like that. You will submit a portfolio of the work that you've done throughout the course at the end of each unit to be assessed for credits towards the degree. If you're a degree student; if you're a foundation student, then you just get your feedback from your tutor as you go along.

14:23 Okay, and group sessions are optional. So as I mentioned, there are no live lectures where you have to go to these things, but your department may put on sessions that are going to be of interest. So sometimes there may be sessions where you share and critique each other's work; sometimes it may be an artist talk—they've got a tutor to come and do a bit of a talk about things; it may be a session on referencing or a particular topic within the course that they're finding lots of students are struggling with.

14:53 But if you don't want to go to those, you'll still get the content that you need for your course in lots of other ways. But you can attend, for example, with your camera off or just use the chat function rather than the microphone if that's how you're comfortable. So do have a chat to either your department or to us if there are things that you'd like to attend but you might need a bit of support to do that. And then additional time is something that we can help with in Learner Support as well.

15:22 All students who have registered with a disability or long-term health condition, we can help you with additional time. For undergraduate students and foundation students, it is usually around a three-month extension on a 12-month unit, so 25% extra time. For Certificate of Higher Education students, it's a little bit different as that's a cohorted course.

15:52 And for short course students as well, it's a little bit different as that is a much shorter term, so that's a sort of two-week extension that your tutor agrees for a short course.

16:00 So hopefully hearing a little bit more about how study at OCA works is reassuring for you. Hopefully you're feeling confident that there are lots of different ways of tackling the tasks that you can make work for you and lots of ways that we can help if you do need adjustments for them. The other things that we can help with are obviously DSA applications, which we've covered—how to apply, when to apply, and what sort of support might be available for you.

16:27 You can contact us by email, or we can have calls or online meetings to discuss challenges that you're having with your studies and kind of help with that. We're working with students on, you know, study plans and how to organise your work and prioritise tasks, target setting, and helping you meet your deadlines. Reasonable adjustments where the course—if the course is already not flexible for you—we can help with reasonable adjustments that are suited to you,

16:56 and pastoral support such as, as we mentioned, extensions in study or even breaks in study. Our team helps with deferrals where you can pause your course, and students maybe do that for lots of reasons. So please get in touch.

17:14 On the OCA website, we do have a Disability Support Form. So we do get a lot of information if you apply for DSA, and if you've got a needs assessment, we get quite a lot of information from that. But for students who either want to give us more information or aren't applying for DSA, a Disability Support Form can be really useful to tell us more about you, more about how your disability may impact your studies, what sort of things you are worried about, and what we might be able to do to help.

17:43 So we'll share that; we'll have a look at it, obviously, in the department. If you've requested contact as well, we'll set that up and meet with you to talk about it. And we'll share the information with your department to make sure that everyone's aware who's working with you on your course. You can submit a new form whenever there's an update if you want, or contact us by email or telephone. And when you start another unit, it may be a good time to review it as sometimes things change.

18:12 Sometimes you've got an additional diagnosis, or sometimes things have changed. So it's a good point then to have a look and think if there's anything different that may be helpful to you.

18:23 So really that's a bit of an introduction to OCA, the Learner Support team, and studying with disabilities. There's obviously a lot more that we could go into, but a lot of it is individual. A lot of it will depend on you as a student, what your support needs are, and how we can best help you. So I'm going to include some details here, and there'll also be a separate document somewhere with other helpful links. So for here, I've included contact details.

18:51 So there is the Learner Support helpdesk where you can submit a message and a query to us. There is our email address, learnersupport@oca.ac.uk, that will send a ticket to the helpdesk for you. And there's obviously telephone. So the helpdesk has a callback request option where you can specify good days and times to contact you. Or I've included our telephone number there. What I would say is we do have a lot of

19:19 pre-booked calls with students, and these are often around an hour long. So if you do call that number and can't get through to one of the team, please leave a voicemail or use the callback request and leave your details and we'll come back to you. But separately, there should be a document with other useful links about the things we've talked about. So if you're interested in applying for DSA, it has the links for DSA England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, for example.

19:47 It has links to a couple of useful pages on our OCA website, such as Studying with Disabilities and a page about the Learner Support scheme. And anything else that we've kind of covered that might be useful will be in there for you to be able to have a look around in your own time. So I hope it's been useful. And as I say, please do use the contact details for any other questions that you've got. Let us know if there's anything else that you wish we'd covered or you think it'd be useful for us to cover next time.

20:17 And thanks for listening.