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Hi Honey, Thanks for this. It seems that ESRC have been phasing this in. We were told earlier this year to invoice them termly (no advice yet to do it annually). Apparently they will then reimburse the University general grant, and we are responsible for getting the monies transferred to our own budgets. I have yet to check whether that's actually happened! It seems unnecessarily complicated, and involves a lot of paperwork. We've always had trouble getting ESRC to agree to a needs assessment. ESRC also require the student's reference number before they'll do anything. We had great difficulty finding this from the people who administer the University's block grant. Sounds crazy, but no one seemed to know, which further delayed things! ESRC said they couldn't give it to us, despite us giving them all the student's other details, & the student didn't have it on any of her paperwork. It would be good if SKILL were willing to take this up. It seems very unfair to treat PGs differently just because they are funded by a research council rather than getting their DSA from their LEA. Sue Sue Green Disability Co-ordinator Student Support & Counselling Service University of Birmingham UK Tel. 0121 4145130 www.sscs.bham.ac.uk/disability -----Original Message----- From: Discussion list for disabled students and their support staff. [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Honey Lucas Sent: 06 September 2006 09:00 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: ESRC 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/