In 2024/25, £161.2 million was spent on DSA funding for 73,000 students. That figure is likely to increase to around 77,000 students and £177 million when the data is updated to show the full year. That means that, on average, each student receives £2,300 in support per year.
These are not small numbers, and as such, are worthy of a fundamental question. A question that is particularly pertinent given that the government is proposing fairly sweeping changes to the software provided through the funding:
That question is: ‘is it worth it?’
Here’s my answer to that.
DSA and academic success
The strongest evidence comes from a 2019 research report commissioned by the Department for Education: Evaluation of Disabled Students' Allowances. The findings are striking.
37% of DSA recipients said they could not have done their course without it. For students who felt confident about passing, 59% said that confidence would not exist without DSA. The support was reported as most critical for mature students, students from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds, students with physical or sensory disabilities, and students whose parents had not attended higher education.
These are precisely the students that widening participation policy is designed to attract. DSA is part of what makes that policy work. Getting diverse students through the door matters. Keeping them there matters more.
The benefits reported by DSA recipients are also felt beyond higher education. Schools and colleges provide some of these products through institutional licences. Others are purchased independently. There is no specific data to quantify this, but the logic holds: software that helps a DSA student has the same effect on any learner with similar difficulties who uses it.
DSA and public finances
The financial case is just as clear.
A student who withdraws without a degree loses roughly £100,000 to £130,000 in net lifetime earnings. The government loses the income tax and NI contributions on that, and potentially gains a long-term welfare cost.
37% of DSA recipients, around 28,000 students per year, say they could not have completed their course without it. Saying you could not have completed your course and actually having to drop out are different things. But the numbers do not need to be dramatic to make the case. If just 3,500* students per year complete a degree they would not have completed without DSA support, the scheme funds itself entirely. That is 4.5% of all students in receipt of DSA. One in twenty-two.
DSA and career prospects
Completing a degree, and completing it with a higher classification, puts DSA recipients in a stronger position in the job market. That leads to more tax flowing into the public purse, and to all the wider benefits of employment over economic inactivity.
Those graduates also move into work with something more than a degree. The strategies developed through specialist study skills support, mentoring, and assistive software do not stop being useful at graduation. Writing reports, managing workloads, carrying out research: the same tools and approaches that helped students succeed at university help them succeed at work.
Employers benefit too. Disabled graduates can arrive in the workplace already knowing how to use assistive technology, already having strategies for managing their condition in a professional environment, and already having demonstrated what they can achieve.
DSA and the economy
DSA has also acted as an incubator for the UK assistive technology sector. By providing a guaranteed domestic market at scale, it gave early AT companies the volume of users and the proof-of-concept they needed to attract investment and expand globally. Many of the products now used by millions of learners in schools, colleges and workplaces around the world started life as DSA-funded software.
The House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee recognised this. In its 2019 report on assistive technology, it could not have made a clearer case for the wider economic benefits of assistive technology, stating that:
Unlocking the full potential of assistive technology could transform our economic outlook, improve workforce efficiency and break the deadlock on the economy enforced by sluggish productivity.
DSA and the person
Most assessors will not be surprised by any of this. The numbers in this article may be new to some, but the experience behind them is not. If you have worked as an assessor for any length of time, you have probably sat with a student who has just understood, for the first time, that the right support could get them through their degree.
That moment is not a small thing. For some students, it is the point at which the course of their life changes.
* 3,500 students is calculated from the total annual DSA spend (£177 million) divided by £51,500 (which gives 3,437, rounded up to 3,500). £51,500 is the estimated lifetime gain to the exchequer per graduate, drawn from Institute for Fiscal Studies research commissioned by the Department for Education. It represents the additional income tax and National Insurance a graduate contributes over their working life compared to a non-graduate, adjusted for the gender split of the DSA-eligible student population and discounted to present value using Treasury Green Book methodology.
References
Department for Education (2019). Evaluation of Disabled Students’ Allowances. Available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5f5241a08fa8f542a1f8dc36/Evaluation_of_disabled_students_allowances.pdf
Institute for Fiscal Studies (2020). The impact of undergraduate degrees on lifetime earnings. Available at: https://ifs.org.uk/publications/impact-undergraduate-degrees-lifetime-earnings
House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee (2019). Assistive technology: Tenth Report of Session 2017–19. Available at: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmworpen/673/673.pdf