Thu 15 Aug 2019 08.00 BST
Last modified on Thu 15 Aug 2019 08.04 BST
Anyone who took their A-levels while coping with mental health problems, chronic illness or disability deserves a particular cheer when they collect their results today. The idea that disabled people “overcome” our disability to succeed is a pity porn cliche, and anyone trying to pat a disabled teenager on the head for leading a normal life will rightly get short shrift. But the reality is, getting the grades at school while having an illness or disability means jumping extra hurdles, not only involving our own health issues.
The inequality still facing disabled young people in Britain means there can be multiple barriers to learning – anything from a teenage girl with anxiety unable to access mental health services, to a wheelchair user doing their homework in an inaccessible bedroom.
At school in the late 1990s with a disability, I was lucky to get good grades. The local authority built lifts and ramps to make my school accessible for my wheelchair, and I had an assistant to help me get around. I missed school frequently due to illness but managed to catch up thanks to a supportive family, good teachers, and a perfectionist streak that led to me teaching myself Russian history during This Morning.
Many others aren’t as fortunate. This week, research by the National Deaf Children’s Society found that deaf children were falling behind at every stage of school, starting as early as key stages 1 and 2. By the time they reach their GCSEs, they’re an entire grade behind. It means that while their peers are celebrating today, less than half of deaf children will leave school with at least two A-levels.
In many ways, this reflects a wider picture of disadvantage for disabled pupils. It rarely gets attention, but the attainment gap between disabled children and their non-disabled classmates is stark. Research by the University of Warwick and the London School of Economics in 2018 found that disabled children were more likely to enter secondary education with lower educational attainment than non-disabled pupils, and were less likely to achieve good grades at GCSE. It’s a sea of untapped potential, where even the minority who do manage to get qualifications are still let down: more than a quarter of disabled young people do achieve five or more A*-C grades, but they are less likely to stay on to take A-levels and less likely to go on to university, than young people without disabilities.
There are multiple reasons for this but social factors – including low expectations of people with disabilities, and experiences of bullying at school – were found by the researchers to be key barriers. It’s a situation backed up by a study released this month. A National Lottery-funded survey of disabled pupils by Disability Rights UK found that most of the young people with special educational needs and disability (Send) questioned described a school life of being bullied and socially excluded, saying that their group of school friends was small or non-existent.
This is not a new problem but it has been intensified by years of austerity, under which negligent underfunding has left special needs education for disabled children on “the verge of crisis”. Forget a dream university place – for thousands of Send pupils, they don’t even have a school place. Others have had their specialist support worker removed; four out of five headteachers have been forced to cut back on teaching assistants, with vulnerable children with complex learning needs the most affected. The National Deaf Children’s Society, notably, point to cuts to support services and specialist staff as a key factor in deaf pupils struggling to get the grades they need. Such inequality runs even deeper for BAME and working-class disabled pupils.
Disability is still too often equated with low expectation: that “stupid” or “weird” disabled people neither have the ability or desire to excel like everyone else. In reality, government ministers need to get smarter to finally bridge the attainment gap by providing structural help: from offering disabled adult mentors for young disabled people, working with schools to deliver material on disability in the personal, social, health and economic curriculum, to long-term investment in Send.
So congratulations to the disabled pupils who went above and beyond in school – no matter what happens in today’s results. It’s surely time the rest of us got to work.
• Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist and author of Crippled: Austerity and the Demonisation of Disabled People
