Disclosing disabilities and confidentiality

Information which students provide about a disability (as an applicant or as a student) is not, without consent, disclosed to other students, or to anyone who does not need to know. 

However, the School has a legal obligation to make reasonable adjustments to meet needs, and to make these it is usually appropriate for some people to know about a disability. 

Legally, the School is “deemed to know” about a disability if it is obvious, or if they have been told by the individual.  If the School is asked not to inform other staff of the disability this will be discussed with the student. 

Also, for health and safety reasons, information should be made known to tutors and fellow students about any disability that would prevent a response to an emergency evacuation.

Like other academic institutions, we maintain records of the number of disabled students. The reason for keeping such records is to enable us to monitor the data in order to check that we are not, unwittingly, discriminating against any particular category of applicants.  For other purposes (such as submitting statistics to the Higher Education Statistics Agency) the information is aggregated and presented anonymously.