NB This is the third page of the online version of the SDT Guidance Note Disability Impact Assessments: A Brief Guide, published in December 2005.

3: Mapping policies and practices

Clearly, some policies and practices have a greater impact on disabled people than others and the first stage will be to conduct a mapping exercise of all policies and practices to determine their relevance to disability equality. The aim of this preliminary mapping exercise is not to examine policies and practices in detail but to determine whether the particular policy or practice is of High, Medium or Low relevance. Disabled people will need to be involved at this point in determining priorities.

A mapping exercise may already have been done within your institution to comply with the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000. If this is the case, a comprehensive list of policies may have already been compiled and this can form the basis of the disability mapping exercise. It is important to check for any omissions because areas such as Estates, which may not have been considered for race equality, are clearly important for disability equality. The Code of Practice highlights that there may be policies or practices which might be considered minor but which have a major impact on disabled people. This should be borne in mind when conducting the mapping exercise. It is also important to ensure that any previous mapping exercise has included practices as well as formal policies.

If this has not already been done, the following list of areas may be helpful as a starting point in identifying what to consider:

Policies and practices relating to:

Policies and practices exist at many levels within an HEI or College. There are institution-wide policies but, in addition, Faculties, Schools or Departments may have their own policies and practices which will be equally relevant and these should be included in the mapping exercise.

Example: A department is considering the use of on-line assessments instead of class tests. This departmental change of policy/practice could have a major impact on disabled students. The impact of such a change should be assessed to measure potential positive and negative outcomes for disabled students.

One method of approaching the mapping exercise, if it has not been done systematically for race equality, would be to ensure that someone in each Academic and functional area has responsibility for mapping the policies and practices in their area with someone centrally overseeing the mapping of institution-wide policies and practices.

For each policy or practice, the following information needs to be gathered:

  1. What is the purpose of the policy/practice?
  2. What are the objectives?
  3. Who was responsible for creating the policy/practice?
  4. Who is responsible for implementing it?
  5. Who are the people affected by the policy/practice?
  6. Is there any evidence that disabled people have different needs in relation to the policy/practice? Think about barriers which may exist for people with different types of impairment.
  7. Does this policy/practice contribute to or hinder disability equality in the HEI or College?

Policies and practices should then be categorised in terms of relevance to disabled staff and students and other users - High, Medium or Low. This then gives a priority order which allows the most relevant ones to be impact assessed first. In establishing the priority level, there may be clues from existing data (for example, admissions or progression data) as to which policies or practices may be causing adverse impact and should therefore be prioritised for assessment.

Who should be involved in the mapping exercise?

It is important that disabled people are involved at this stage in determining the relevance of policies and practices to them, through a working group or other involvement mechanism.

Detailed advice on involving disabled people can be found in the Equality Challenge Unit's Briefing Paper 3: Disability Equality Schemes: Collecting and improving baseline data and the importance of involving disabled people (ECU, 2005)

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