Chipping away at the mountain: Disabled students' experience of higher education

Abstract

Within the context of marketisation and managerialism, this article discusses the effects of recent attempts to dismantle the barriers encountered by disabled students in higher education. Exploring statistics compiled by the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council and drawing on recent Scottish small-scale studies (Baron et al, 1996; Brown et al, 1997; Hall & Tinklin, 1998), it is suggested that although disabled students now have a greater presence in higher education, nonetheless many barriers to full participation remain, and indeed may be reinforced by some initiatives intended to widen access. The article supports Clarke & Newman's contention (1997) that an effect of new managerialism is to sidestep important social, cultural and political problems, leaving these in an unresolved state to be tackled by less powerful people when they encounter them in practice. The barriers met by disabled students are structural in nature, but in the dominant liberal equal opportunities approach means that these are seen by policy makers in individualised and medical terms and therefore the solutions proposed are often inadequate. Initiatives to widen access, rooted in the liberal belief that change will come about through appealing to individual goodwill, have failed to take into account the intensification of labour within higher education and have therefore achieved only limited success.