Widening access and improving provision for disabled students: funding allocation method for 2009-10
This allocation reflects the proportion of students that each institution recruits who are in receipt of the Disabled Students' Allowance (DSA). There is also a floor in the allocation, to ensure a minimum level of funding for all institutions.
The provisional allocation for 2009-10 totals £13.3 million for the sector as a whole and has been calculated using:
- for higher education institutions: 2007-08 HESA student data
- for further education colleges: 2007-08 ILR F04 data.
(Note that we have set aside a further £200,000, for allocation by July 2009, to allow for corrections by institutions to their underlying data.)
The algorithms used on these data are based on the Government's guidance on eligibility for DSA, as outlined in the publication 'Bridging the gap', as follows:
Step 1. Calculate the proportion of students who were in receipt of the Disabled Students' Allowance (DSA) of the home and EC student population who would be eligible for DSA were they disabled.
Step 2. Institutions are then ranked according to the proportion of their students in receipt of the DSA (as calculated in Step 1) and split into quartiles, as shown in the table below. This is smoothed to ensure that no institution falls by more than one quartile since last year. Separate weightings are attached to each of the four quartiles, as follows:
| Quartile | Proportion of students in receipt of DSA | Weighting |
|---|---|---|
| A (lowest proportion) | < 0.0288 | 1 |
| B | between 0.0288 and 0.0385 | 2 |
| C | between 0.0385 and 0.0564 | 3 |
| D (highest proportion) | > 0.0564 | 4 |
Step 3. Institutions' share of the £13.3 million available is pro rata to the assumed undergraduate and postgraduate FTE for 2009-10, weighted according to the quartile in which they fall as follows:
- Disability funding = Quartile weighting x London weighting x FTE x Rate
Where Rate is the amount of disability funding available per weighted FTE, which is currently £5.66.
(Along with all HEFCE's widening participation allocations, the assumed FTEs are scaled subject to a London weighting of 8 per cent for inner London and 5 per cent for outer London.)
Step 4. Allocations calculated in Step 3 are subject to minimum allocations as set out in the table below:
| HEIs | FECs |
|---|---|
| £10,000 |
0 < FTE < 50, £500
50 < FTE < 250, £1,000 250 < FTE < 500, £5,000 FTE > 500, £10,000 |
If the allocation calculated in Step 3 falls short of the appropriate minimum allocation in this table, then this minimum allocation will be awarded instead.
Further details on the actual fields and algorithms used to calculate the 2009-10 WP funding are published in Appendix 7 of the forthcoming HEFCE publication '2007-08 statistics derived from HESA data for monitoring and allocation of funding' and Appendix 4 of the forthcoming publication '2007-08 statistics derived from ILR data for the monitoring and allocation of funding in FECs' for HEIs and FECs respectively.
Funding allocation method for 2008-09
Widening access and improving provision for disabled students: funding allocation method for 2008-09
Further information
For further information contact Christine Daniel, tel 0117 931 7373, e-mail c.daniel@hefce.ac.uk.
Last updated 13 March 2009