The UK government is currently consulting on changes to how assistive software is funded through Disabled Students’ Allowance (DSA). The consultation closes on June 18th, 2026.
You should know about it, because while the consultation identifies some real problems, it’s targeting the wrong cause – and disabled students are likely to absorb the consequences.
The problems in the current system are real. Commercial incentives have distorted behavior, software recommendations have ballooned, and parts of the market genuinely need scrutiny. But instead of fixing the incentives that created those problems, the consultation proposes cutting software access itself.
And that’s a pattern we’ve seen before.
What DSA is, and why it matters
Disabled Students’ Allowance (DSA) is a government grant for disabled students in higher education. It’s non-repayable, it isn’t means-tested, and in the 2023/24 academic year it supported over 88,000 students at a cost of £203 million. It covers things like specialist equipment, assistive software, additional travel costs, and human support – BSL interpreters, study skills support, that kind of thing.
DSA isn’t a luxury. It isn’t a workaround. It’s the mechanism that funds the gap between what disability law technically requires of universities and what disabled students actually need to access their education. Those are not the same thing. I want to come back to that, because it matters.
The problems are real
The consultation isn’t wrong that there are problems with how assistive software gets funded through DSA. It’s just wrong about what those problems are.
Some of the issues it raises are genuine. Built-in accessibility features have genuinely improved over the last decade. Free tools exist that didn’t used to. Some software categories have blurred into general student tools that any student might use, which is legitimately outside DSA’s scope. Prices for some products are eye-watering in ways that aren’t always justified. And yes, there’s anecdotal evidence that some students are being recommended so many software products that they end up overwhelmed and don’t use any of them.
Those are real problems. They deserve real solutions.
What the consultation proposes instead is to slash the software catalog, mandate the cheapest available option, and assume that free alternatives are good enough for most students. That’s not solving the problem. That’s performing a solution while leaving the actual cause completely untouched.
The consultation’s blind spot
Here’s what the consultation document doesn’t say clearly, though it gestures at it in carefully bureaucratic language: the people recommending assistive software to students are employed by the companies that profit from supplying it.
Let me be more specific.
DSA framework contracts were awarded in 2023 to two companies: StudyTech and Capita. Between them, they cover the entire country. In their respective regions, they are responsible for needs assessments – the process by which a disabled student’s support requirements are identified – and for supplying the equipment and software that those assessments recommend.
The consultation treats over-recommendation as though it emerged naturally from the system.
But it didn’t. The system was built to incentivize it.
The assessor works for the supplier. The supplier profits from the assessment.
This is a structural conflict of interest, and it is load-bearing. When the consultation notes, carefully, that “anecdotal feedback has indicated that in some cases, students are now being recommended so many different assistive software products through DSA that some find it overwhelming,” what it’s describing – without naming – is the entirely predictable outcome of asking commercial companies to assess need for products they then sell.
I clicked one link. On StudyTech’s student-facing page, in large font, with the word ‘upgrade’ in bold: “Approximately 50% of our customers choose to upgrade from our standard recommended laptop.”
That is a sales conversion rate. Proudly displayed on a page for disabled students accessing a government-funded grant. The needs assessment and the upsell are the same funnel.
And Capita – the other framework supplier, responsible for half the country’s DSA students – is the same outsourcing giant that became synonymous with the UK’s deeply controversial Work Capability Assessment system.
That history matters because it reflects a broader pattern: disability-related assessment systems being outsourced to private contractors operating inside rigid commercial frameworks.
How we got here
This isn’t unique to DSA. It’s a pattern that repeats itself with depressing regularity:
- A genuine need exists.
- A market forms around it.
- Commercial incentives distort behavior.
- Public backlash starts.
- Support gets reframed as excess.
- Disabled people lose access.
- Everyone acts shocked.
We saw it with legal aid. The government contracted private companies to deliver legal services, costs spiraled because the incentive structures encouraged it, and the response was to cut legal aid funding – which meant that people who needed legal representation stopped getting it. The Bar Council has documented that cases with litigants in person take longer and cost more – the opposite of what the cuts set out to achieve. Around 80% of private family law cases now involve at least one self-represented party. The “cost saving” cost more. And the people who lost out weren’t the law firms.
Here’s the part that should make you furious: the government wasn’t properly tracking the downstream costs. The National Audit Office criticized the Ministry of Justice’s data collection as inadequate. Parliamentary committees were asking them to measure the impact. The data either wasn’t collected or wasn’t published. Which means there was no evidence base to prove the policy was failing – just a growing catastrophe that everyone in the legal sector could see and nobody in government had to account for.
The DSA consultation is the same playbook, down to the missing receipts. The consultation’s evidence base for the software cuts is described, repeatedly, as “anecdotal feedback.” Not outcome data. Not systematic tracking of whether students used the software they were given, whether it helped them stay enrolled, whether removing it changed their educational outcomes. Anecdotes. We heard it’s a lot. Trust us.
If the cuts land and disabled students quietly drop out at higher rates, there will be no data to prove it was the software cuts that did it. Just as there was no data to prove legal aid cuts cost the justice system more than they saved. The accountability gap is not an accident. You don’t collect data that would prove your policy decision was wrong.
Why “free is good enough” isn’t
The consultation leans heavily on the idea that free or built-in tools have improved enough to meet most students’ needs. For some software categories, in some circumstances, that’s true. But it’s doing a lot of work it isn’t qualified to do.
Take text-to-speech software. The consultation proposes to stop funding it – other than in exceptional circumstances – for students with dyslexia, ADHD, autism, and mental health conditions. That is not a small population. Those are four of the largest disability categories in higher education. The reasoning is that free tools exist and are “accessible, simple to use, and often integrated into widely used platforms.”
That’s technically accurate and practically misleading. The difference between a browser’s built-in read-aloud function and a properly configured specialist tool isn’t a feature list. It’s whether a student who has been using that tool for years, who has built their entire study workflow around it, who has been trained on it, can actually use it to get through their degree.
Or take the “lowest cost available” proposal for paid software. The consultation proposes that where a student is approved for paid assistive software, DSA will fund the cheapest option on the catalog that technically meets their needs.
JAWS – the screen reader used by many blind and low-vision users – is expensive. It’s also the tool that a significant proportion of visually impaired users have spent years learning, whose keyboard commands are in their muscle memory, that their job and their studies depend on. “Here’s the cheapest option that technically meets your needs” is the assistive technology equivalent of handing someone who’s used Android for ten years an iPhone and saying they both make calls.
Familiarity isn’t a preference. For many disabled users, it’s a functional requirement. The consultation’s framework has no way to account for that.
But don’t universities have to cover this?
Yes, technically. Universities fall under the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations (PSBAR), and they have obligations under the Equality Act. They are legally required to make reasonable adjustments.
Here’s why that doesn’t solve the problem.
You can be fully WCAG 2.2 AA compliant – every checkbox checked, every audit passed – and still have a website that a dyslexic student genuinely struggles to use. Compliance frameworks document what was built. They don’t guarantee what gets experienced. “Accessible” in a legal sense and “actually usable by this specific person with this specific combination of needs” are not the same thing.
DSA exists precisely in that gap. It was never meant to replace universities’ legal obligations – it was meant to sit on top of them, to cover the distance between what compliance delivers and what individual students actually need. The consultation’s implicit logic – that improved university accessibility means less need for DSA – misunderstands what DSA is for.
What the actual fix looks like
The consultation is asking the wrong question. The question isn’t “which software should we stop funding?” It’s “why is this system recommending more software than students need, and who benefits from that?”
The answer points to a structural fix: separate the needs assessment function from the supply function. Stop asking commercial suppliers to assess need for products they then sell. Create independent assessment processes with proper outcome tracking – not “did the student receive software” but “did the student use it, did it help, are they still in education.”
That’s harder than cutting the catalog. It requires dismantling a procurement structure that’s now over two years into a framework contract. It requires admitting that the 2023 framework design was flawed. It’s politically uncomfortable in ways that “we’re funding the cheapest tool available” is not.
But uncomfortable is not the same as wrong.
What you can do
The consultation closes on June 18th, 2026. The Department for Education is accepting responses online, by email at dsa-software.consultation@education.gov.uk, and by post.
You don’t need to be a policy expert to respond. You need to tell them what you know. If you’re a disabled student who uses assistive software, tell them what it does for you and why a free alternative wouldn’t. If you work in disability support in higher education, tell them what you actually observe about student needs. If you work in accessibility and you recognize this pattern, tell them you recognize it.
The consultation asks 29 questions. You don’t have to answer all of them. The ones that matter most right now are questions 13 and 28 – the demanding software proposal and the lowest-cost proposal – and question 29, the equality impact assessment.
They are asking for your views. Give them your views.
The system needs to be dismantled and rebuilt with the right incentives. That won’t happen by June 18th. But making sure the overcorrection doesn’t land on disabled students – that might.