Assistive software under threat

The proposed DSA software cut fails the government’s own test

The Treasury sets the rules for judging decisions like this one. On the government’s own figures, removing specialist software from the Disabled Students’ Allowance fails them.

Article written by Chris Purcell, entrepreneur and co-founder of the assistive technology company CareScribe, which he has since exited.

In March, the Department for Education proposed to stop funding most specialist assistive software through the Disabled Students’ Allowance, the note-taking, captioning, mind-mapping and text-to-speech tools used by students with dyslexia, ADHD, autism or mental-health conditions, on the grounds that free tools now do a comparable job. The Allowance supported over 88,000 disabled students in 2023/24, at a cost of £203m.

There are moral and human questions here, and others argue them well. I am not adding to that case or contesting it: nothing below is about whether the cut is right, or what disabled students deserve. I am looking only at the money, on the government’s own terms. Even there, it fails.
 

Treasury Green Book sets the rules

The government does not decide questions like this on instinct. The Treasury’s Green Book, binding on the department, sets the rule: weigh any saving against the wider costs and benefits it risks, discounted to today. A saving that results in higher downstream costs is not a saving.

The government already accepts this. Its own review of young people not in education, employment or training, published in May, found the state spends far more managing disengagement than preventing it, and names the neurodivergent and mental-health cohort this cut targets as the fastest-growing driver.
 

So let’s apply the government’s test.

The saving is small, and the department has not said how small: its consultation prices software but puts no figure on it, and the equality assessment quantifies nothing. It can only be modest: equipment of all kinds has accounted for about a third of the DSA budget, and software is a fraction of that. Let’s be generous, call it £1,000 a student – probably an overstatement.

The benefit is not small, and again, the figure is the government’s own. The IFS, in work commissioned by the Department for Education, put the net Exchequer return on a degree (what a graduate returns to the Exchequer over a lifetime) at around £110,000 for the average man and £30,000 for the average woman, based on the Treasury’s own discounting. These are conservative averages, already accounting for those who drop out or never repay, and the right basis for the whole group.

Now divide one by the other: what share of affected students must drop out to cancel out the savings? Be as generous as the evidence allows. The £1,000 saving against the £70,000 midpoint of the IFS range is about 1.4 per cent — one student in 70. Push the benefit down to the £30,000 female average: 3.3 per cent, one in 30. Cut it brutally to £17,500: 5.7 per cent, one in 17.
 

Implausible figures for benefit achieved through DSA

Below either end of that range, the country loses money. In effect, the department claims that support given to students assessed as needing it, by experts who know both those students and every available product, makes the difference for fewer than 1 in 70.

Is that plausible? Its own files suggest not. In the 2016 equality analysis, DSA recipients scored two to three points above the sector-adjusted average for attainment and progression; those who declared a disability but received none scored two to three points below. It conceded this does not prove causation, which is fair, but the direction is not in doubt.
 

Free tools scarcely evaluated

And on what matters most – whether the free tools do the job – it has done little. Under Freedom of Information, it confirmed that, before concluding they were comparable, it held no data comparing their accuracy with the specialist software, had not tested them in the locked-down browsers used for online exams, and could not name a specialist or disability-led organisation consulted. The “exceptional circumstances” that would still be funded are undefined; it published no appraisal of the savings relative to the downstream costs its rules require.

Because the break-even is so low, the burden is the department’s, and it is evidence that it admits it lacks. A government may make a cut. It may not make one on a group the law protects, without the appraisal its own rules require, and call the result a saving. On the government’s own figures, it is not a saving at all – it is a cost the appraisal never counted.

Disclosure: Chris Purcell co-founded and later exited a company in assistive technology, so comes to this with an interest, stated plainly. Trained as an economist, he applies the government’s own framework, not his own authority – and every figure here is the government’s.
 

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Further reading and resources

We have more information about Disabled Students’ Allowance here

Higher education barriers

Supporting students with additional needs

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