Reforms to Disabled Students Allowance are turning into a costly crisis

Back in January 2021, DSA Application Forms had an eight day turnaround. Needs Assessment Reports were taking four days, and response times on emails from students and universities were four days.

The first term is a busy time – by the end of November, those were all taking between 12 and 15 days. What delays like that do is generate substantial casework, and pushes up the bill for interim support faced by universities.

Things weren’t much better a year later – 15 or 16 days for those processes. And by this time last year, they were worse again – a full month.

Help was coming. In February of this year, partly at the behest of ministers keen to save money, the SLC introduced its “enhanced Disabled Students’ Allowance service model” – with two suppliers, Capita and Study Tech, responsible for the provision of needs assessments, assistive technology equipment, and assistive technology training and aftercare for students in receipt of DSA.

This was supposedly a two birds, one stone moment. The CMA had found that some DSA suppliers had colluded over the price of key services and equipment. So changes were made to sort that out.

But as well as that, the SLC said its new model would both “improve the DSA application journey” and the “overall customer experience” via its ability to see the process “end to end” – all while delivering greater value for money for the student and the taxpayer.

At the time Jackie Currie, SLC’s Executive Director, Business Operations, said:

We are committed to continuing to improve the service we deliver to customers. I am pleased we are launching the improved service, which is a real step change for how DSA is delivered. We are working with our suppliers, Capita and Study Tech, as well as a range of stakeholders, and from the outset, students will experience a much smoother journey to receiving their DSA, which is the most important element of these reforms.

Last week a news release painted a rosy picture of progress – although there was a clue:

While the service is still in its infancy, we are pleased with early positive feedback from students, and we continue to work to improve customer journey times.

You can see why. DSA1 form turnaround time is still a month – and student/provider email response time is now up to 45 days, better known as nine actual weeks. To get an actual response.

Put another way, if you email today, you should get a response in early February.

Here’s how things look now. Of all eight categories, students themselves top the charts:

DSA1 is the “yes, you can book a needs assessment” bit. Needs Assessment Reports is SFE actually processing the report. And while that’s taking 12 days, I’m also told that that masks disabled students encountering significant delays in accessing a study needs assessment appointment in the first place – it seems that Capita/Studytech are often taking a month just to book people in, presumably because there’s not enough assessors.

The assessor jobs seem to have been recruiting for months – advertised here in the Capita incarnation at a starting salary of £22,000. The 21 and over rate on the National Minimum Wage is £11.44. Multiply that by 37.5 and then by 52, and you get £22,308. Maybe there’s something I’m missing.

Staff in disability departments are naturally tearing their hair out, spending hours on end on hold to the practitioner hotline. And, of course, this then has a fundamental impact on students themselves.

Add it all up, and that “improved customer journey” looks something like this:

• Application to approval for Needs Assessment – six weeks or so
• Assessment centre contacts the student – another week
• Assessment date – 3 – 4 more weeks
• Report written and sent to SFE – another 2 weeks or so
• Award letter comes through – 3 more weeks
• Equipment suppliers provide any required equipment – 2 – 4 more weeks

Twenty working weeks is a lot of an academic year that students are paying fees for.

One thing that has emerged so far is a measure of student satisfaction with the new arrangements – said to be up at over 80 per cent. But that’s based off 4 per cent of students who have been through the process – one wonders what a proper population survey would reveal.

Anecdotally, things on the ground seem to be much worse. There are endless tales of students getting study needs appointments relatively quickly but then the appointment is cancelled, often more than once. We might wonder whether the assessment providers only have to report the initial appointment, not when it actually took place.

Something else that disability staff are telling me is that many of the appointments and resultant needs assessments are so poor that they have to be challenged. It’s now much harder for disability practitioners to do that – it’s supposed to be student led – but just as in every other part of higher education, because students aren’t properly informed of their rights and entitlements, they miss out.

Then practitioners write the emails for students to send to the assessor and the DSA team… and then potentially wait nine weeks for a response, when they’ve already waited more than months to get that far.

Across these periods, universities have to fund interim support – and, in pursuit of that value for money push, the SLC has tightened its rules around reclaiming those costs back from DSA.

Universities can now only claim back to the date of the DSA1 letter, and not the whole application time (factoring in the lengthy delays in getting a DSA1 form), and only if the assessor has explicitly mentioned that the university has funded interim support it in the needs assessment.

As a result, if the student hasn’t said the magic words “I’ve been having interim support from my university” at their appointment, it doesn’t happen. That is leaving universities with huge bills for interim support which can’t be reclaimed, at a time when budgets are already under massive strain.

The SLC also tends to make positive sounding claims about phone line answer times – but multiple practitioners tell me that every day one of their team will be on hold for at least 45 mins, after which they usually get cut off. Staff can’t do their jobs as practitioners if they can’t get hold of the DSA Team, and they can’t move any casework along because everything is on hold waiting for them to respond to often very simple requests.

Adding insult to injury, that DSA team is also, I’m told, developing a tendency for pushing things back onto disability advisors quite explicitly, like as getting quotes for taxi travel, or sorting out students who had a prior needs assessment report from a centre which has been forcibly closed down thanks to the reforms.

And naturally, students rarely understand the difference between DSA and university support – which also means university disability staff are getting increased complaints about something that is nothing to do with them.

Add it all up, and all of the things that we thought were going to wrong back in March 2023 have done – and then some.

A spokesperson for the SLC said:

With any market reforms of this size and scale, the implementation period will be complex, however, the early feedback from customers in relation to the provision of DSA is better than in previous years. The benefit of having full end-to-end ownership and provision of DSA for the first time, means we are able to respond to customer feedback and take steps to improve the service.

For instance, in recent weeks we have prioritised resource to expedite the processing of Needs Assessment reports. Given our finite resources, this inevitably means shifting focus from other elements of the service, as we’ve done with e-mail responses recently. However, this week, we have redeployed resource to work through these email responses.

We are also working with our suppliers to ensure the service they provide is as supportive and efficient as possible, and to continue to improve overall customer journey times. Our main aim is to provide the best possible customer experience and we continue to welcome feedback from our customers and stakeholders.

The good news, I suppose, is that SLC continues to work with its Disabled Students’ Stakeholder Group “to provide updates on the new service and discuss future improvements”.

Here we are in 2024 with a Disabled Students’ Stakeholder Group that doesn’t seem to have a student on it. What a time to be alive – and unable to access the education you’re made to pay for.