The Disability Advisory Service believes that every students with disability, specific learning difficulty or long term medical condition or mental health issue should be able to reach their full potential and offers the following support to students and the staff supporting them:
Students
- Provide information, advice and guidance on key steps students need to take to access support at university
- Reach out to students before arrival to ask for further information about their disabilities (where they have declared)
- Gather and assess information and evidence on disabilities and needs of students and share with appropriate staff via the Individual Learning Plan on RISIS (where consent is given)
- Identify where reasonable adjustments are needed
- Signpost to other support services
- Co-ordinate provision of non-medical helpers such as notetakers, academic mentors and social mentors
Staff
We can also support staff supporting disabled students in the following ways
- Producing Individual Learning Plans for students. This means module convenors can run off spreadsheets of all the needs of disabled students on their module and distribute to relevant teaching staff
- Advise on a range of possible adjustments you can discuss or implement in your department to make your teaching accessible
- advise on embedding inclusive practice
We will be updating our web content, and toolkits in the coming months, and will be developing some guidance around the impact of recent legal cases, on how academic colleagues can be more inclusive with faster ‘off-the-shelf’ reasonable adjustments.
If you would like to contact us, or get involved in working with us on improving processes, please email disability@reading.ac.uk