Problems of disabled students

Abstract

Continued improvement in accident surgery, antibiotic treatment, antenatal care, and medical surveillance has increased the life expectancy of so many young people in the past two or three decades that ever more are reaching the age of access to tertiary education with the handicap of a physical or congenital disability that formerly denied them survival. The educational facilities of special schools, long-stay hospitals, and home tutoring have also improved progressively in recent years, and the disabled individual who is intellectually endowed may now achieve comparative—if not distinctive—academic success. Thus the “wheel-chair” student, the blind undergraduate, or the paraplegic tutor has become a noticeable feature of the contemporary campus. Evidently, however, many physically disabled people intellectually capable of benefiting from tertiary education are not being accepted by colleges or universities, despite ever increasing and welcome efforts by many pioneers. It has been variously estimated that, while the incidence of physical disability in the population is about nine per 1000,1less than two per 1000 are found in university communities as students or staff,2and of some 7000 school leavers finishing their education in special schools for the physically handicapped less than 40% entered further education when more than 80% were deemed by their teachers intellectually fit to do so.3While nationally a considerable increase in the absolute number of disabled students at universities and colleges has occurred in recent years, this minority group is characterised by underachievement in the postsecondary sector of education—and the reasons are not hard to find on close inquiry. © 1976, British Medical Journal Publishing Group. All rights reserved.