Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Involving disabled people in HEFCE's work - Steve Egan, Deputy Chief Executive, HEFCE
We really want to make a difference for disabled people and for their life chances, and for their access to higher education,
and one of the things that we need is for disabled people to tell us what they need us to do;
and the best way to do that is to ask disabled people.
We are a big organisation in terms of the amount of money that we give to higher education
– it's eight billion pounds of public money
– so there's an awful lot of investment that we make on the public's behalf in higher education.
And we set a lot of policies, for learning and teaching, and for research,
and when we do that we’re often not fully aware of the consequences of what we do,
so we have something called a Sector Impact Assessment,
which amongst other things takes account of equality and diversity issues.
And so every time we develop policy, we go through this process,
and we ask ourselves the question, 'what opportunities are there to really make a positive difference to people
with disabilities and what unintended negative consequences might there be?'
The best people to advise us on that are people with disabilities themselves.
And that's something we are really committed to doing.
The event I was really thrilled with because we had so many people turn up.
I was worried when we first asked people to help us with this that we wouldn't get very many people –
as it turned out we had 140 people expressing their interest.
And not just 140 people but 140 people who are really enthusiastic, really there to help us,
and really pleased that we were making this initiative, and this attempt to do something positive.
We're now committed, of course, to doing that every year, to trying to engage with disabled people in this way;
not just to leave it from one year to the next but every year to say,
'last year you told us we should be doing this; this is what we have done –
is that now working or can we improve it still further?'
Anybody can express an interest to help us in the way that I have described, help us develop our policy,
help look at what we do and say are there things that we can do better.
If people are wondering, well, 'is that for me or not?' well, they can have a look at our web-site,
they can see the range of activity that we are involved in.
Maybe there are parts of it that people feel, 'yeah I'd like to get involved in that'
and other parts they wouldn't. That's fine.
We're happy to have people help us in any area that they think they have got an interest in
or they have got an expertise that might be helpful to us. The more the merrier.
Higher Education Funding Council for England