What support do we offer

Putting in place support in classes and assessments

Once you tell us you have a disability, you will be assigned a Disability Advisor who will work with you throughout your studies to organise your support.

• If you are a new student and have declared a disability on your application form, we will contact you before your course starts to encourage you to make an appointment with your assigned Disability Inclusion Advisor.
• If you are a continuing student, please email disabilityandinclusion@napier.ac.uk to arrange your first appointment.

Meeting with your Disability Inclusion Advisor is important, even if you have included information on your application form or mentioned your difficulties to an academic member of staff. Please note that support, including exam adjustments, is only put in place once you have discussed and agreed it with your Disability Advisor.

You might meet with your Disability Inclusion Advisor in person, online, or on the phone. You can keep in touch with your Disability Inclusion Advisor by email to discuss any support you need during your course.

If you had support at school, college, or another university we will normally match that support. If you have had a support plan in the past, it is helpful if you can bring that to your first meeting with your Disability Inclusion Advisor.

Your Disability Inclusion Advisor can:

• Create a personalised Learning Profile (support plan) to inform your tutors about the support you require
• Arrange exam adjustments
• Provide advice about resources to help with your studies, including technology
• Help you to apply for additional funding, such as Disabled Students' Allowance (DSA) or the Eire Fund for Students with Disabilities
• Refer you to other agencies to support you with study skills, mental health etc
• Create a Personal Emergency Evacuation Plan (PEEP) to decide how to help you exit a building safely in an emergency.

The support we organise depends on your individual needs. Your support will be documented in a Learning Profile (support plan). This is a document setting out all the support you need. It is shared with your tutors and the University’s exams team, so that they can provide your support. We can update your Learning Profile as and when your needs change.

These are some examples of adjustments we commonly put on Learning Profiles:

• Support from a study skills tutor
• Use of a PC in exams
• Smaller room for exams
• Extra time in exams
• Use of a calculator on placement
• A pre-placement meeting with your Personal Development Tutor and placement mentor

If we write a Learning Profile with you, you will be able to find it on your Student Record. Lecture recordings and access to class materials in advance are generally mainstream expectations, so we do not normally put those on Learning Profiles.

Once agreed, learning profiles will be accessed by Programme and Module leaders, Personal Development Tutors and School Disability Contacts, to ensure that your support needs are understood and implemented.

We’ve provided some student guidance so that you can see how the process works.

Keeping in touch

As a team, we try to stay in touch with all the students we work with every few weeks during term-time with updates from the team, our disabled student ambassadors and news from other teams we think you might be interested in. That includes reminders, for instance to check you're happy with your exam support arrangement or to renew your DSA funding.

Advisors will not normally check in regularly to ask how you're getting on – we tend to ask you to get in touch with us if you have any questions or need any help. If that's something you might find hard to do, please let your advisor know or ask someone to contact us on your behalf so we can adapt how we normally work to meet your particular needs better.