Disabled students aren’t time travellers. And extra time isn’t yours to give

If, for some surreal reason, we were to establish a ranking of the most-deployed reasonable adjustments for disabled students, extra time would be top of the charts.

Exam coming up? Have an extra hour. An essay due? Take an another week. That final year dissertation? Add thirty days to the deadline.

We don’t (as far as I know) have figures for HE, but an illustrative example comes from Ofqual – which calculated that in 2022–23, arrangements for 25 per cent extra time made up 65.8 per cent of all approved access arrangements.

There’s good and bad reasons for it. In many cases it simply takes students longer to process information, or they find it harder to comprehend or concentrate. Extra time levels the playing field – allowing them to reach and demonstrate the same standard that others do.

This handy list from Teesside illustrates other ways in extra time might help in, say, an exam:

• Students with diabetes may need to regularly test their blood sugar levels and adjust them accordingly.
• A student with a chronic back condition may need to take breaks to relieve pain and discomfort.
• Students with high levels of anxiety may need to take breaks in order to employ techniques to alleviate their anxiety such as breathing exercises or mindfulness so that they can engage with their exam
• Students with irritable bowel syndrome may need to use the bathroom urgently and for varying amounts of time
• Students with ADHD or ASC may utilise time to take breaks in order to employ sensory techniques to manage their concentration level.

Tell me, doctor

Of course in some other cases the need to allocate extra time is almost certainly about poor or inflexible assessment design. X or Y is how we’ve always assessed learning for nondisabled students – and so when the assessment method itself subconsciously comes to symbolise the standard required, inevitability kicks in.

For an individual episode of assessment, it makes some sense. Technically if a student comes out of their exam an hour after everyone else is already in the pub celebrating, I can argue that that’s socially unfair – but I’m not sure I’d win an argument that it represents a “substantial disadvantage” in court.

And so those little breaks or weeks when other students seem to celebrating become a part of disabled life – something to be coped with rather than challenged.

But the more I’ve been talking to disabled student leaders this summer, the more concerned I’ve been getting.

At the individual assessment or even module level, maybe we should accept that the bits of extra time that are allocated to demonstrate learning – paid for from their bank of spare time – are just the price that disabled students have to pay.

But once you move from making student life leisurely to eye-wateringly efficient, students may not have the extra time that a university “gives”.

And when you add in the knock-on effects and tot up the cumulative time costs, the impacts are stark.

To get a sense of it all, I asked ten of the disabled student leaders I met this summer to add up the hours, days and weeks they’ve had to spend via the adjustments they’ve been given.

Where are we going this time?

One student’s dated assessment design largely consisted of end of year exams and a final year dissertation. That’s pretty much two full days when they weren’t able to top up their income in May, and another week or so in June when they weren’t able to celebrate the end of the year with their friends or attend career development events.

Another, largely assessed via coursework, told me that she routinely got 25 per cent extra time on her deadlines, and more often than not had to apply for resits (which itself took time) and then start from scratch when granted them. She reckons a conservative estimate is that this added up to 462 hours across her degree – or £5,285 in lost national minimum living wages. Disabled students allowance ain’t covering that.

Another student officer – assessed through a mix of coursework, practicals and exams – added it all up to be about 550 hours. And given their need to be earning while learning, that was paid for by foregoing the volunteering and leadership extracurriculars that they thought they’d need to get over the line in an interview – especially given the discrimination they reasonably thought they’d face in the workplace if they declared.

One student thought they’d foregone a whole Christmas with family time and earning opportunities gone as they used up the “extra time” they’d been allocated. Another clocked up a full six weeks of time she didn’t have attempting resits caused by deadline pile-up. One chemist was castigated for not spending enough time in the lab when he was using the “extra” time to complete project work instead.

Is this the fifties?

A student in the Russell Group told me that being extra hours in stretched labs meant having to book time that wasn’t available during the day. Another said his school’s reliance on group work meant him having to negotiate other students’ diaries – generating inevitable resentment. A third noted that while other students had the time to reflect on the feedback they’d got, their “extra time” meant that they were always playing catch up – because there was always another deadline looming.

One student with ADHD also had a physical injury in their third year – but got the vibes from those that decide that extra time on top of extra time wasn’t really sobering they could offer. I rarely meet international students that declare – and one that didn’t said that the resits they needed coupled with the restrictive length of the visa meant they would not have completed in time to get on the graduate route were it not for winning their SU election. It’s their duties in that role that are now suffering.

An especially interesting excel sheet was sent to me by one student who described the way in which fixed placement periods became completely incompatible with extra time for assignments. Another described considerable pushback from the personal tutor, who repeatedly referenced that they would never get extra time in the “real world”. One was sanguine about the five years they’d taken to get their degree, figured she’d have got it done in 4 if she could have slowed down rather than re-took, and was furious that she’d been made to clock up 20k more debt than her friends in the process.

One student asked me to bear in mind that just the process of getting a diagnosis – visiting doctors, booking assessors, having meetings with disability staff, filling out forms and then having more meetings with every set of academics on every module to explain what was required and why all up to something substantial in and of itself.

Another noted that the silent assumption that they would need to rely on extenuating circumstances and resits all had pile up effects – reducing the rest time their non-disabled colleagues got, and wrecking their ability to sustain friendships or meet commitments to others.

Or nineteen ninety-nine?

One physically disabled student sent me a vivid time and motion study describing the elaborate planning involved to get to a 9am lecture – navigating public transport, astonishingly complex routes around campus and factoring in the lift that’s almost always out of service saw her leaving the house at 6.30am while everyone else was rolling out out of bed at 8am.

It really took its toll, especially because most weeks I’d have three or four days on campus to cover six contact hours.

Another who took prescription medication to regulate their concentration and anxiety and get to “normality” lamented that some of the other non-disabled students on their course took the same drugs that they used to to enhance their own performance – saving time that others got to use on social activity and group study sessions. “I became their dealer to top up my income” wasn’t on my bingo card for this blog.

And of course all of the messages and Google sheets that I got were about assessment. I got a wedge of background information about the extra time it takes to engage in the learning in the first place – sometimes because of the disability, but more often than not because of the failure to adjust for the disability.

One student even sent me a long document describing her attempts to secure alternative assessment methods precisely to avoid having to have extra time – with justifications much more detailed then I’ve seen in other settings. But she was told that letting her demonstrate her learning in a different way “wouldn’t be fair”. Nope. It’s not letting her do that that was the unfairness.

Another heartbreaking tale involved a really carefully designed diary, combining part time work with caring responsibilities and the management of anxiety and complex set of physical and social communication impairments. Extra time was never an option – but was almost always the solution on offer.

I dreaded it. I always knew I wouldn’t be able to use the extensions they offered.

And one student leader told me of the way in which the management of multiple extra time “gifts” – sometimes standard, sometimes discretionary, sometimes being allowed to attend early and sometimes being allowed to offer her group a later deadline – became impossible to handle. When she mistakenly submitted one assignment (six in a month) late, her request for a further deadline was denied. “You’ve already been given extra time”. The retake – capped at 40 per cent – clashed with a hospital visit she’d already rescheduled twice.

Don’t bet your future

Over the summer as I’ve been travelling between the UK’s towns and cities on trains, I’ve regularly experienced deep frustration at the endless delays that our over capacity system suffers from.

When one train is delayed by signalling problems, even if it could make up the time it can’t – because too many other trains are on the network.

On a long journey involving multiple operating companies, the knock on impacts can be huge. And for passengers, while the odd delay might be OK, the build up of frustration at the regularity of it all is intense.

I’d add that given what I know about train companies and the way they deliver assistance for disabled people, I’m convinced that someone in a wheelchair couldn’t do the job I do. Even though they obviously could.

See also the NHS. When a system is wound that tight, delays have huge ripple effects. The sector repeatedly hands out “delays” as solutions – when the truth is that they almost instantly manifest as the causes of multiplying problems.

Of course there’s also huge impacts on staff, and part of the blame here lies with a student finance and credit system that is hopelessly unforgiving of anyone taking longer than three years to obtain 360 credits.

But this isn’t hard. If it takes a student longer to undertake an exam or write an essay at the micro level, it must follow that it takes them longer than three years to obtain a degree.

On one roll of the dice

Eating into that discretionary extra year that students get with student finance is spending those reserves (which are actually extra debt) on your disability rather than the setbacks and emergencies that it’s surely designed for.

And if they do need longer, why should a disabled student be clocking up more debt than others on their degree just because they’re disabled – all while they’re made to feel like a failure?

The point is that universities that rely on giving out extra time to adjust for a disability are giving something that’s not theirs to give. And not only is it not theirs to give – students routinely don’t have any spare left to allocate either.

They’re not Marty McFly. Once you run out of time, you run out. It’s not like money that you can top up. It’s gone. And it’s not the education system’s to give.

Maybe the solution I’m inching towards – taking more time to do your degree – itself eats into the time a disabled student might spend in the labour market. And I’d prefer more accessible learning environments, assessment, campuses and cultures.

But maybe the stress of getting it done so fast wrecks their early years in the labour market anyway.

It’s not as if they’re graduating into anything other than a hostile “middle youth” where the markers of adulthood (marriage, kids, home ownership, etc) are getting later and later.

All four governments and their dated definitions of full time student, “annual” tuition fees, credit systems, maintenance loans ands student housing contracts need to change – there’s no meaningful justification for having the youngest undergraduate graduates in the OECD.

And universities should know that that reliance on extra time and the substantial macro disadvantage that it puts students at is almost certainly unsuitable, unsustainable, immoral and unlawful.