Scottish
Disability
Team
Guidance On International Courses and Disability Issues
A Scottish Disability Team Guidance Note, published April 2007.
This article is available to read online or for download:
Legal Note
These Scottish Disability Team Guidance Notes are intended to provide general advice only, and are not an authoritative treatment of the law. Professional advice should be sought before acting on any of the material contained in these Guidance Notes as it may not be appropriate to your circumstances. These Guidance Notes are intended to relate primarily to the law as it applies to Scotland, however colleagues from other countries and elsewhere in the UK may find it useful to refer to the information contained herein.
Acknowledgements
The Scottish Disability Team would like to thank Martin Ingram, Solicitor, Thorntons Solicitors, (mingram @ thorntons-law.co.uk ) who devised and wrote this document.
A note on Language: In this document we use the language of "impairment" and "disability" as defined by the social model of disability. It is also the preferred language of the disabled peoples’ movement. Whilst people have impairments, e.g. deafness, blindness, muscular dystrophy etc, disability is the outcome of the interaction between a person with an impairment and the environmental and attitudinal barriers s/he may face. The Disability Discrimination Act 2005 (DDA), however, uses the term "disability" to mean what the social model defines as "impairment", so it occurs in this way in these Guidance Notes when direct quotations from either the DDA or its associated Codes of Practice are used.
Contents
- 1: Introduction and Overview (this page)
- 2: General requirements of the DDA
- 3: Obligations of universities in relation to students on international courses under the DDA
- 4: Management of risks involved
1: Introduction and Overview
This guidance relates only to the specific obligations placed upon universities under the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, as amended, ("DDA") in relation to the provision by universities of international courses to students, and disability discrimination issues which may arise as a result. They do not cover any other obligations which a university may have under the DDA or other statutory enactments or the common law.
For the purposes of this Guidance, where a university is placing a student on an "international course", this may constitute one of the following situations:
- Where the university has set up a campus outwith the UK, and the students are matriculated students of the "home" university; or
- Where the university allows its students, to undertake a period of study abroad at an independent institution outwith the UK, and the student is still matriculated to the "home" university.
Under both of these circumstances, the "home" university shall have certain obligations under the DDA to those students which it places on such "international courses".
This guidance is aimed at providing assistance for Senior Managers with responsibility for international courses, Disability Co-ordinators/Advisers, international liaison officers and admissions officers of the university. This guidance assumes knowledge of the DDA. More detailed information is available from the website of the Disability Rights Commission, in particular the Codes of Practice for providers of Post-16 Education and Related Services, as well as previous guidance issued by the Scottish Disability Team.
This guidance covers the following issues:-
- General requirements of the DDA.
- Obligations of universities in relation to students on international courses under the DDA.
- Management of risks involved in respect of providing international courses to students in compliance with the DDA.