OfS announces a set of expectations on disability adjustments and support

Suzanne Carrie – its Head of Student Equality and Welfare – used a keynote at a Universities UK conference to set out the plan, which will include expectations on mental health as a disability. It’s aiming to publish in early 2027.

The statement will set out what OfS expects of providers as a regulator – but it will be “principle based” and will allow institutions to decide how best to meet the expectations.

OfS says it will work collaboratively with the sector to develop the content between now and publication, gathering perspectives from sector bodies, membership bodies of practitioners and specialists, charities, disabled people’s organisations, disabled students, and bereaved family members.

More information on how it plans to collect those views is to follow in the next few months.

It will be more than just guidance. OfS says it will monitor the impact of the statement at both system-wide and individual provider level – and that if it sees evidence that a provider isn’t meeting the expectations, it “may take action, including considering if this suggests a breach of one of our conditions of registration.”

In other words, OfS isn’t necessarily creating a new regulatory condition – yet. But it’s making clear it sees a route from the statement of expectations to enforcement under existing conditions.

Regular readers might experience a sense of déjà vu at this point – and not just because of the various reports that suggest a major problem in this area.

Mind the gaps

Carrie’s speech set the scene with OfS’ track record in the area – investment in sector mental health work, the University Mental Health Charter, the Disabled Student Commitment, and the Disability in Higher Education Advisory Panel that’s been running for two years.

There was praise for the Higher Education Mental Health Implementation Taskforce and its suite of guidance and toolkits. But the key word was “however.”

Despite all of that voluntary activity, Carrie said OfS is:

…deeply concerned by issues that students are facing, and the slow pace of change in some areas.

Students who report mental health as a disability have lower continuation rates than non-disabled peers, and some of the lowest completion rates of any disability type. In the NSS, disabled students report consistently poorer experiences than non-disabled students across every theme area – and those gaps are widening each year.

The numbers are hard to argue with. In 2024-25, more than 85,500 undergraduate full-time students in the UK had a mental health condition as a disability on their HESA record. Mental health conditions are one of the two most commonly declared types of disability.

NHS estimates suggest around one in four 17 to 19 year olds and one in five 20 to 25 year olds had a probable mental disorder in 2023.

And Disabled Students UK’s 2025 Access Insights report – based on responses from over 1,100 disabled students across 110 providers – found that fewer than half of students with agreed support have it consistently implemented, that pandemic-era accessibility measures like lecture recording and hybrid participation are being rolled back, that administrative burden on disabled students is itself a barrier to access, and that escalation and complaints processes are neither safe nor effective.

The OIA says that disabled students now make up just over 40 per cent of complaints – up from around a third in 2023. Of those who described their disability, the largest category was mental health.

Frame game

Two things in the speech are worth noting. First, the framing. Carrie was very deliberate in treating mental health as a disability issue under the Equality Act rather than a separate pastoral or wellbeing concern.

That matters because the Equality Act’s anticipatory duty means providers can’t take a narrow approach to disability support that only covers students with a diagnosis or a formal declaration. Carrie said universities need to:

…consider the complexity… relating to students with an emerging understanding of their conditions or students who haven’t managed to get a formal diagnosis.

For universities that have tended to insist (or imply an insistence) on diagnosis as the key to unlocking adjustments, that’s a warning shot.

Second, the collaborative workshops OfS ran with sector colleagues apparently surfaced two problems:

…a lack of clear and shared understanding of responsibilities, and inadequate senior leadership commitment to ensuring legal duties are met and risk is appropriately managed.

That’s not OfS saying providers are doing a bad job per se, it’s OfS saying that appears to be a lot of unresolved disagreement inside providers about what’s required to comply with the law – and providers’ own staff are telling it that senior leaders don’t understand their legal responsibilities. That’s a significant couple of findings to put on the record in Woburn House.

As I noted back in October, the Access and Participation Plan picture reinforces the concern. Across 99 published APPs, 27 providers have no disability targets whatsoever across any stage of the student lifecycle.

If we isolate targets related to experience – ignoring access – 35 providers have set no targets for disabled students in continuation, completion, attainment or progression. That’s over a third of institutions with no measurable goals for improving outcomes once disabled students arrive on campus.

And when we look at the OfS’ own checklist areas – things like processes for students to raise issues if support isn’t meeting needs, communication about reasonable adjustments, sharing adjustment information across the institution – just 39 providers discuss a complaints escalation process, and none of the other areas go above 60.

Carrie stressed that charter marks, sector groups and other guidance will retain a role in “encouraging continuous improvement and sharing good practice” – in other words, this isn’t OfS saying existing frameworks like the University Mental Health Charter or the Disabled Student Commitment are pointless. It’s saying they’re not sufficient on their own.

And the collaborative framing is notable. OfS is going out of its way to say it will listen – to practitioners, to charities, to disabled students, to bereaved families. That last group is a pointed inclusion that signals the extent to which student deaths, and particularly suicides, are part of the backdrop to this work.

The playbook

If you’ve been following OfS’ work on harassment and sexual misconduct, the choreography here will feel very familiar.

In April 2021, OfS published a statement of expectations on harassment and sexual misconduct – voluntary recommendations, explicitly not connected to conditions of registration.

The then CEO Nicola Dandridge said so directly. OfS commissioned an independent evaluation from SUMS Consulting, which reported in late 2022 and found that progress had been “inconsistent and slow.”

OfS concluded that “self-regulation has not been sufficient to deliver consistent, effective approaches for students across the sector.” A consultation on a new condition of registration – E6 – launched in February 2023. E6 was published in July 2024 and came fully into force on 1 August 2025.

From statement of expectations to binding condition of registration – four years.

Today’s announcement follows the same opening moves. Lots of voluntary sector activity and frameworks – charters, commitments, taskforces, guidance – that haven’t translated into consistent improvement, an OfS that says it’s tried being collaborative but the pace of change isn’t good enough, and a statement of expectations framed as non-binding but with monitoring and a clear signal that regulatory escalation is available if the sector doesn’t respond.

If the disability timeline mirrors the harassment one, you’d be looking at a binding condition of registration on disability landing somewhere around 2030-31. Of course, that depends on what happens politically with OfS’ remit between now and then, and whether the sector takes this warning seriously.

But there are also differences. Unlike the harassment statement of expectations – which arrived amid the Everyone’s Invited campaign and intense media pressure – the disability announcement doesn’t have a single galvanising moment behind it.

What it has instead is a steady accumulation of evidence from the NSS, the OIA, DSUK, OfS’ own commissioned research, and an insight brief it published in October 2025 that shows a sector with worsening student experiences despite improving headline outcomes. The evidence base is arguably more comprehensive, if less dramatic.

Someone has to

One question lurking underneath all of this is that the body that’s supposed to enforce the Equality Act – including the anticipatory duty, the duty to make reasonable adjustments, and the prohibition on discrimination against disabled people – is the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC).

If providers aren’t meeting their existing legal obligations to disabled students, that’s the EHRC’s beat. Its most notable recent contribution was an advice note off the back of the Abrahart case, but systematic enforcement action against providers who aren’t making reasonable adjustments? Not so much.

So what OfS is really saying – without quite saying it – is if the body whose job it is to enforce disability law in higher education won’t take a serious interest, we will.

It also raises a question about the existing regulatory framework. When the speech says OfS could consider whether a failure to meet these expectations suggests “a breach of one of our conditions of registration,” which condition is it talking about? The most obvious candidate is B2 – resources, support and student engagement.

B2 requires providers to “take all reasonable steps” to ensure each cohort of students receives resources and support sufficient to ensure a high quality academic experience and that students succeed in and beyond higher education. It explicitly says “significant weight” should rest on an understanding of the particular needs of a given cohort – and that more needy students would require more resources and support.

Using it to hold providers to account for failing disabled students would be a significant expansion of how the condition has been interpreted – and would need some fleshing out to be credible. Whether the statement of expectations is the precursor to that fleshing out, or whether it’s the precursor to an entirely new condition along E6 lines, who knows.

By design

The legal framing is different too. With harassment and sexual misconduct, OfS acknowledged that it was creating obligations that went beyond what the law required of providers in relation to student-to-student and student-staff conduct.

With disability, the existing legal framework is arguably stronger – the anticipatory duty, the requirement for reasonable adjustments, the prohibition on discrimination – but Carrie’s speech suggested that providers aren’t consistently meeting even these existing obligations, let alone going beyond them. That’s a different kind of problem.

Back in October I noted that the OfS checklist published alongside its insight brief was a useful starting point for institutional self-reflection, but without clearer standards, stronger accountability mechanisms and recognition of the resource challenges universities face, it is unlikely to transform disabled students’ experiences.

At least we now know that OfS has accepted the design argument. Waiting for poor outcomes to trigger provider-level action doesn’t work when disabled students are achieving despite, not because of, their experience.

Whether the regulator can design something that works the other way round – starting from experience and feeding forwards – remains to be seen.