Educational needs are a higher education issue
As the schools system tries to get to grips with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) support, it turns out the higher education sector might have a lot to say. David Kernohan tracks learning needs into higher education
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David Kernohan is Deputy Editor of Wonkhe
Higher education in England currently sits between three departments – none of which is primarily or even tangibly interested in higher education.
All three are looped into the devolution of skills provision and growth that has always characterised the Burnham-led administration. Beyond this, the new Department for Business, Innovation, Science, and Trade is mostly concerned with driving economic growth more widely, while the Department of Work and Pensions has hands full reconfiguring (again) the UK’s social security system. And the major policy focus of the Department for Education is currently on special educational needs and disability (SEND) provision in schools.
The sector clearly has the ability to influence the debate in each of these three areas – but it needs to do so in ways that ensure it has the resources it needs to deliver on national priorities that sit a long way outside the historic purposes: providing higher learning for traditionally academic young people, and conducting high quality research.
Of the three departmental areas of concern, the SEND debate in schools feels most remote from sector concerns. Historically, the perception has been that pupils on the SEND pathway have tended not to progress into higher education – and even those that do are then separated from the plans and approaches that supported them in compulsory education. An education, health, and care plan (EHCP) does not follow an applicant from school to university (though it persists until the age of 25 for those taking other post-compulsory routes).
But universities are already dealing with the impact of a growth in both prevalence and reporting of learning disabilities and mental health problems. Dealing with these growing demands is a big part of what higher education – in the absence of much meaningful NHS action on youth mental health – has been doing over the past decade.
The scope of SEND
As of 2026, more than 1.8 million pupils in England have the special educational needs marker – representing a year-on-year increase of 91,400, and there has been a substantial increase every year for the past decade. This 1.8 million represents some 20.8 per cent of the school population: 6 per cent of all pupils have a personalised EHCP, and a further 14.8 per cent have some level of additional SEN support without an EHCP.
Support like this encompasses a range of identified needs, not all of which will be accompanied by a medical diagnosis. Both SEND provision and EHCPs are officially provided according to need – which may include classroom observations, measures of actual against expected academic performance, or insights from a range of professionals who may work with a child.
In terms of primary needs (a pupil with SEND or an EHCP can have multiple overlapping needs) “speech, language, and communication needs” are most common among those without an EHCP, while personalised plans are more likely to support autism spectrum disorder. Even within these broad definitions, there are huge differences in learning needs from person to person, and huge differences in the kinds of qualification outcomes that may be possible.
SEND is the polar opposite of a “one size fits all” approach, and the sheer diversity of what needs to be provided adds greatly to the expense of doing so. Thus far, the proposed government approach has been to attempt to standardise where possible within mainstream provision: this approach has seen an explosion in the number of parents and guardians looking to ensure that the specific package of support their child needs is preserved via an ECHP – which sets out detailed support requirements and is more often associated with a specialist placement outside of the mainstream.
SEND in higher education admissions
You’ll recall that around 20 per cent of school-aged children currently have some kind of SEND support need: you may be surprised to learn that around 20 per cent of university entrants made a disability or mental health declaration when applying to start university in 2025 (ten years ago it was around ten per cent). While there is not a direct read-across between formal SEND or EHCP status at school and making what is a personal declaration as part of the higher education application process, it is fair to assume that similar proportions of students will have some kind of a support need in each setting.
These are not necessarily the same people. It is important to be very careful with any subject declared personal categorisation information. Categories of disability exist for administrative convenience (as indeed, in a whole can of worms I do not want to open, are markers like ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation). They group applicants based on how they identify rather than any externally verifiable fact – nobody from UCAS comes round to determine whether you are “really” on the autism spectrum (if indeed such a thing were medically possible, given that diagnoses are based on observed or reported behavior rather than physiological or genetic markers) or were SEND at school.
It may also surprise you that the proportions of applicants with a SEND marker and the proportions of accepted applicants with a SEND marker are very similar (both a little over 20 per cent), and were similar even a decade ago. Declaring a disability does not appear,at a very broad level, to affect your chances of being accepted into higher education at all.
SEND at university and beyond
While UCAS collects data on how students describe themselves at the point of application, HESA asks that providers update such information for each academic year of study. For this reason, the number of students with SEND is not stable: some students may choose to declare based on a new understanding or a new diagnosis, others may neglect to make a declaration they made in previous years as it feels less relevant to where they are now. In 2024-25 some 21 per cent of all undergraduate students declared a disability.
For postgraduate study the comparable figure is 13 per cent. It’s not clear – and this is another important point when you deal with self-declaration – whether this is because there are less postgraduate students with SEND, or because postgraduates are less likely to declare. Even so, declarations are steadily increasing for all students year by year.
The Office for Students access and participation dashboard (we are about due a 2026 iteration of this, but OfS clearly has a lot on its plate right now) gives us an insight into how students who declare disability fare at and beyond university. The long and the short of it is: not always well, but better than you might think. Students with a disability marker are marginally less likely to continue into a second year of study (88.9 per cent of students without the marker did so according to the OfS definition, 88.7 per cent with the marker), and to complete their course (87.8 per cent without the marker, 85.7 with).
Of those who do complete, attainment (actually getting the degree) is very slightly (0.4 percentage points) more likely if you have the disability marker. But those without the marker are slightly less likely (1.6 percentage points) to move on to a “graduate designation” – OfS defines this as further study at a higher level, or a job in the top three SOC categories.
Movement through the course is one thing – how students feel is another. On each National Student Survey theme, students who report a disability are less satisfied – a trend particularly noticeable when it comes to course organisation and management. We can also see that students with mental health or learning disabilities are particularly affected by this aspect of their study.
Supporting SEND
The Office for Students is working on developing a statement of expectations for the support that disabled students can expect as they study. A panel led by Deborah Johnson (the University of Bedfordshire vice chancellor who is also Cabinet Office Disability and Access Ambassador for universities) is due to report in March 2027.
An insight brief, published in October last year, sets out the key aspects of equality of opportunity for disabled students as OfS sees it. The new information at that point was a report commissioned by OfS, which found that around three-quarters of disabled students felt well informed about the requirements for applying for learning support and reasonable adjustments. It is clear that there is work to be done, and that
Higher education as a single system within a civilisation is not equipped to deal with wider questions around prevalence. It has been argued both that the growth in students indicating that they have SEND status is a change in the prevalence of these problems, and that it is a new confidence that people are feeling in speaking about these challenges openly. Some have suggested that people “play the system” in order to get the maximum available support, others point to an underlying deficit in the way education (and indeed society) is organised. It is possible – in fact it is likely – that all of these things are true simultaneously.
The recent Fonagy report into ADHD and autism in society (two groups of diagnoses linked directly to educational needs) argues for a shift from a “diagnosis-dependent” to a “needs-led plus diagnosis approach” – a focus on responding to needs as they present themselves even before diagnosis is made: to prevent avoidable distress and impairment where possible, and allow people to “participate” in education, work, communities, family life, and relationships. It calls for enhanced public information about mental health conditions, focused on prevention (in particular via long-term investment in youth, community, and voluntary organisation).
The finding that made the headlines is that sceptics are wrong to cast doubt on the struggles faced by young people. While overdiagnosis and misdiagnosis are always risks, and while diagnosis will improve with time, an absence of a diagnosis does not mean an absence of a problem. And systemic interventions are often more effective than over-stretched attempts to provide bespoke support.
Again, this feels like the way that universities have been working for years. The disabled student premium funding has been preserved at a per-student level for 2026-27 – meaning, given the rise in disabled student numbers, a cash-terms increase of 17.2 per cent. It’s the largest growth in any provider allocation from OfS, but that rate is £128.53 per student, per year. It isn’t anything like enough to offer personalised support, so the Equalities Act preference for reasonable adjustments to mainstream provision has become the default. Universities have been, and are, changing the way they teach and offer wrap-around support based on expressed student needs.
It’s a strength of the sector that we don’t talk enough about. Higher education can’t say that it always gets it right, but compared to the rest of education and the world of employment it does a good job.
