Universities are still failing disabled students

A new report has found that UK universities still aren’t doing enough to support disabled students. The 2025 Access Insights report from Disabled Students UK found that 63% of disabled students have gone without adjustments.

Disabled students

Disabled Students UK surveyed over 1,000 students from over 100 universities about their experiences. This is the third year the study has run and the largest into Higher Education accessibility in the UK. It’s particularly relevant now with the government focusing on getting young disabled people into education.

So you’d think with the push to get disabled people into education that it would at least be accessible, right? Wrong.

As the report says

Disabled students are not new in Higher Education. What is new is the growing body of evidence that shows, year after year, where and how our systems continue to fail them.

Attitudes improving, but access worsening

One good thing discovered in the survey is that attitudes from staff are better than in previous years. There’s also seemingly a greater understanding of disability now. However, 20% have been made to feel unwelcome by staff. As the report notes, this goes alongside structural barriers that stop disabled people from progressing and doing as well as their nondisabled peers.

The report found that although support can be agreed by staff, it isn’t necessarily delivered. Less than half of those surveyed said their approved adjustments were consistently implemented. 63% of disabled students ended up studying without their adjustments. A big reason for this is that chasing them up repeatedly takes too much time and energy. Just 44% said that all their agreed adjustments had been followed through with.

The amount of disabled students being able to get official personalised support from Disability Services fell last year. 66% of disabled students had a support plan, down from 77% in 2024.  The proportion of declared students with a support plan fell from 77% in 2024 to 66% in 2025 and fewer students met with a Disability Advisor, suggesting a shift towards more informal or automated models of support under growing capacity pressure.

Disabled students can’t physically get to class

Many students were concerned that measures which came into place at the start of the COVID pandemic are now being rolled back. These of course made studying more accessible for disabled students. The survey found that remote or hybrid lectures are being stopped. Even measures such as lecture recording don’t happen as much.

As the report says:

These decisions are frequently justified as restoring educational quality or campus experience, yet they disproportionately exclude already marginalised students.

This represents a failure to learn from evidence. Universities have seen that these measures work. Choosing not to retain them is a choice that prioritises convenience or tradition over accessibility.

On top of this, students are still struggling to physically access lectures. Disabled students are still struggling against inaccessible buildings, unsuitable teaching spaces and inflexible timetabling.

Accessible uni accommodation also a problem. Students report that this is limited and often more expensive than other accommodation options. 47% of disabled students said they had to pay extra for accessible student housing.

Access fails make disabled students feel unsafe

Scarily, the report found a “significant proportion” are not confident that they would be able to safely evacuate their university buildings in a fire.

The report also found that despite all the access failures, many students did not feel safe or confident enough to challenge decisions or chase up support. Awareness of the complaints support is also low, so many do not report issues. Some who did complain said that their treatment had worsened afterwards.

Students also reported that complex systems were hard to navigate. This means those with less capacity for these tasks are less likely to seek help for access failures.

As a result, failures are not formally recorded, so universities are unaware of them. And the only people who face consequences are the disabled people whose lives are made worse by access failures.

Despite this, students said that staff are more supportive and understanding. However lack of training and being unclear about their responsibilities towards disabled students undermined this.

What needs to happen

Disabled Students UK have some recommendations for UK universities to make studying easier for disabled students

They say that agreed support must be met, and this should be monitored across the students’ time at uni. There should also be consequences when needs are not met. DSUK also says the administrative burden on students must be reduced. Disability Services should also work alongside other parts of the university, as opposed to being there to compensate for inaccessibility. It must also be easier and safer for disabled students to raise issues, without fear of mistreatment.

The organisation wants universities to take clear ownership of accessibility. It also expresses how important it is that any cost-cutting exercises are assessed on how they would impact disabled students. They also want universities to avoid rolling back measures that clearly help disabled students.

Labour once again proves they don’t care about disabled people.

Let’s not forget that this is all happening while the government is obsessed with young disabled people who are Not in Employment, Education or Training (NEET). You’d think then that they’d be investing more to ensure that disabled people can actually get into education. But that would assume that they actually want to help disabled people into education, instead of just demonising us.

Because it’s far easier to call disabled young people lazy, than it is to actually support them to thrive.

Featured image via Studying in the UK