Scotland’s review of part-time and disabled student support is an exercise in running down the clock

The analysis is of a consultation that ran from 26 June to 9 October 2025, attracted 524 student responses and 57 stakeholder responses, and was supplemented by qualitative interviews with 37 students and a round of stakeholder engagement sessions.

It’s a substantial document, and there’s plenty in it. But the timing tells its own story.

Parliament dissolves on 9 April. The election is on 7 May. The original commitment, made in the Programme for Government published in 2023, was to “improve the parity of living cost support on offer for those wishing to study part-time or flexibly.”

Two and a half years later, what’s been delivered is a consultation, and an analysis of that consultation. The “next steps” section runs to a single paragraph:

“the Scottish Government will consider all relevant perspectives and issues raised through the consultation and continue to engage with stakeholders as part of the development of future policy and practice.

What we know now

The findings aren’t especially surprising. Part-time and distance learning study is valued because it lets people combine education with work, caring, disability, and geography – 54 per cent of student respondents said it allows them to balance study with work commitments, and 37 per cent cited disability-related flexibility as a key benefit.

But the system built to support those students is widely seen as too complex, too rigid, and too stingy. Just over half (52 per cent) of student respondents said support for part-time and distance learning needs to be simplified. Among stakeholders, that figure was 92 per cent.

On disabled student support, 63 per cent of students and 88 per cent of stakeholders said simplification is needed. Application forms were described as long, repetitive, and confusing, with students having to apply to multiple organisations and resubmit the same information annually.

The report notes that this complexity is itself a barrier – people miss deadlines, give up on applications, or drop out of courses.

The frozen threshold

The Part-Time Fee Grant for HE is available to those with personal incomes under £25,000. That threshold hasn’t changed since 2013. As the report notes, it’s now close to the UK minimum wage, which means students on modest incomes – or those with dependants, or living in higher-cost areas – fall just above the line despite still struggling financially.

The consultation records an engagement session where it was highlighted that a student could become ineligible mid-course simply because of a small pay rise.

Among students, 59 per cent felt the current eligibility criteria work to focus support on those who need it most. Among stakeholders, only 32 per cent agreed.

Suggestions for reform included uprating the threshold in line with inflation and wage growth, introducing a graduated system to avoid the cliff-edge effect, or considering household income. A few respondents suggested thresholds of between £30,000 and £35,000.

Living costs and the benefits trap

There was strong support for extending living cost support to part-time and distance learners – 56 per cent of student respondents felt this would affect how they learn and study, and 84 per cent of stakeholders thought it would affect their institution’s course provision.

Respondents said it would let students concentrate on their studies, reduce the need for paid work, and improve retention. Among the stakeholders, universities, colleges, and private providers all expected it would increase demand for part-time and distance provision.

The complication is in the detail. Scattered through the report are repeated references to students choosing part-time study specifically to maintain benefits eligibility, and to concerns about how new living cost support would interact with Universal Credit and other benefit entitlements.

Several engagement sessions flagged it. Respondents called for better communication with DWP, or even integration of DWP and student support systems. One stakeholder meeting noted that many Scotland-based students now undertake distance learning courses at institutions elsewhere in the UK, which adds another layer.

For a significant cohort, the “choice” between full-time and part-time study isn’t really about learning preferences – it’s a benefits calculation. The Scottish Government can’t reform student support for part-time learners without engaging with the UK-level benefits architecture, but the consultation never directly addresses this dependency, and the analysis doesn’t attempt to model it.

DSA and the intensity threshold

On disabled student support, the picture is more mixed. Two-thirds of student respondents had their support package in place within two months. Three-quarters said the package was followed once in place. A majority said they wouldn’t change anything about their DSA experience.

But the minority who struggled described a process that punishes the people most in need of its help – repeated assessments, distress from having to explain their circumstances over and over, anxiety around telephone-based needs assessments, delays in getting written confirmation of diagnoses, and the prohibitive cost of medical evidence.

In the qualitative interviews, one on-campus HE student reported not applying for DSA for their current year of study because they found the process too stressful. Another had applied with a mentor’s help the previous year but couldn’t complete the process without that support. The report notes that neurodevelopmental conditions can make it harder to reach out for support to complete an application – a polite way of saying the system’s complexity is a particular barrier for exactly the students it’s meant to serve.

The DSA study intensity threshold in Scotland is 50 per cent, compared to 25 per cent in England and Wales. This appears once in the report, in the context of a stakeholder meeting, and is never analysed.

But it means that Scottish students studying at lower intensities – the students this consultation is supposed to be about – are locked out of disability support that their counterparts elsewhere in the UK can access. If there’s a single concrete policy lever that could be pulled quickly, this looks like it.

What we can’t see

The analysis is useful as far as it goes, but there are some significant gaps in what it can tell us. There’s no cost modelling – not even an indicative figure for what extending living cost support to part-time learners would cost, or what raising the PTFG threshold to £30,000 or £35,000 would mean for the public purse. Without that, the consultation generates expectations it can’t contextualise.

There’s no data on how many students the current system has actually lost. Students describe dropping out, pausing studies, or never enrolling because of funding problems, but the consultation can’t quantify the scale of that attrition.

The most important population – people who wanted to study part-time or flexibly but were deterred by the support system before they ever got started – is absent from the sample. The document’s own methodological caveats are clear that a self-selecting Citizen Space consultation will structurally undercount the people the system has already failed, but it never really grapples with the implications.

So what now

The analysis document itself is now primarily a pre-election artefact. It tells the next Scottish Government – whoever forms it – what the sector thinks, what students said, and where the pressure points are.

The original PfG commitment was to improve parity of living cost support for part-time and flexible learners. The consultation confirms there’s overwhelming support for doing that.

Whether any of that leads to action depends on what the parties put in their manifestos over the next few weeks – and on whether whoever wins is willing to action any commitments ahead of the weeks leading up to Election 2031.