Morning, all.
We have recently heard that the Economic and Social Research Council
(ESRC) is changing its administration of the DSA as of the 1st October
06. Just in case you were not aware this was looming, I thought it
might be helpful to summarise our understanding of these changes.
From 1st October the ESRC is devolving much of its financial and
administrative processes to individual universities. This leaves HEIs
with the responsibility to administer ESRC grants and dish out the money
to their students who get ESRC funding. The total amount of money for
these students is given to HEIs in a lump sum by the ESRC each year.
For students who need DSA, the ESRC is asking HEIs to decide whether or
not to put that student forward for a Needs Assessment. There do not
appear to be any guidelines as to what criteria to use when making these
decisions, other than that the student needs to have submitted some form
of medical evidence. The decision making also seems to have fallen on
the HEI's Disability Officers.
If a student is recommended for a Needs Assessment and subsequently gets
equipment, NMH support etc then what we understand will happen is that
the HEI will need to foot the bill for all this, and then reclaim the
total from ESRC each September.
As you can imagine, we are rather worried about how all this is going to
work in practice! Specifically, we are concerned at the lack of clear
guidelines about who can go forward to a Needs Assessment. While this
only affects ESRC-funded students at present, it has been suggested to
us that other research councils are likely to follow a similar model
quite soon.
Has anyone else had clearer guidelines from ESRC? If no clearer
guidelines exist, then can perhaps SKILL negotiate for some national
guidelines which we could then follow?
Bw Honey
--
Honey Lucas
Disabled Students' Adviser
Student Services
Oxford Brookes University
Headington Campus
Headington Hill
Oxford OX3 0BP
Tel: 01865 484689
Fax: 01865 484656
Please visit our website for information
about the Student Disability Service:
www.brookes.ac.uk/student/services/disability/
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