This paper presents new empirical findings from the OfS-funded project Addressing Disparity of Support: Co-creating Continued Professional Development and Guidelines on Reasonable Adjustments with Disabled Students. The project responds to persistent structural inequalities in UK higher education, where disabled students continue to experience gaps in academic support, personal support, progression and belonging. Evidence from national datasets and sector analyses (DSUK, 2024; OfS, 2024) highlights inconsistent implementation of Reasonable Adjustment Plans (RAPs) and uneven institutional cultures of practice. These challenges mirror wider European concerns about equity of participation and accessibility in higher education, reinforcing the project’s relevance to international debates.

Against this backdrop, the project adopts an explicitly user-led, participatory research design, working in partnership with undergraduate disabled students across three universities. The research addresses three core questions:

1. How do disabled students experience academic and personal support and how do these experiences vary across institutions and disciplines?
2. What forms of knowledge emerge when disabled students are positioned as co-researchers, and how does this challenge institutional assumptions about Reasonable Adjustments?
3. How can co-produced survey and workshop data inform new professional learning frameworks and guidelines that transform institutional ‘knowing’ into ‘acting’?

These questions align directly with ECER 2026’s thematic concern with the changing conditions and potentials of education research. By foregrounding lived experience as a form of analytical knowledge, the project also speaks to long-standing European intellectual traditions of participatory, democratic and justice-oriented education research (May, 2024).

The project is grounded in critical disability studies, inclusive education theory, and participatory epistemologies (Peruzzo and Raaper, 2024; Goodley et al, 2025). These theoretical traditions centre lived experience as a legitimate and essential form of knowledge, problematise normative assumptions underpinning HE policy and practice, and call for relational forms of evidence-making. Further, the project explicitly draws on ‘inclusion by design’ and user-informed/user-led methodologies, which challenge the deficit-based framing historically embedded in HE structures.

ECER 2026’s theme is directly relevant to our project as it shows how conventional institutional knowledge practices (surveys, policy enactment, staff training) are insufficient when they are not co-produced with the people most affected by them. By adopting a collaborative and distributed epistemology, the study reveals the epistemic labour disabled students perform to navigate systems that are not designed for them, and highlights how this labour becomes a resource for institutional transformation when formally recognised within research processes.

The survey and workshop phases generated rich data not only on disabled students’ experiences but also on their analysis of institutional structures, as the fragmentation between academic and personal support, misinterpretation of RAPs, poor communication pathways, and emotional labour required to continuously advocate for reasonable conditions. These insights demonstrate how educational research can shift from extracting knowledge about disabled people to co-constructing knowledge with disabled people for the purposes of practical action.

In doing so, the project advances an ecological approach (Gibson et al, 2025), calling for joined-up practices and centring ‘disabled leadership, qualifying disabled students and staff as co-leaders, users and evaluators throughout, not just consultees’. The findings illustrate that institutional capacity to act is enhanced when research methodologies themselves are re-designed to redistribute authority, meaning that epistemic change becomes inseparable from structural change. The findings therefore offer transferrable insights for European higher education systems seeking to address inequality through structural rather than compensatory reforms.

The project applies a mixed-methods, participatory research design implemented across three UK universities. The methodology combines i) quantitative survey analysis (pre- and post-attitudinal surveys); ii) qualitative workshops (co-designed and co-facilitated with disabled student co-researchers); iii) iterative thematic analysis; iv) co-analysis sessions with disabled students, academic staff and student-services staff. i) Quantitative survey analysis A cross-institutional survey captured: experiences of academic support, effectiveness of personal support systems, satisfaction with RAP implementation, sense of belonging, confidence navigating institutional processes. The instrument was co-developed with student co-researchers to ensure relevance and accessibility. Quantitative items used Likert-scale measures of perceived adequacy of support and institutional responsiveness, while open-ended items elicited critical reflections. The survey achieved strong engagement across all three institutions, generating a robust dataset for comparative analysis. ii) Qualitative workshops Workshops were designed according to inclusive research principles: flexible participation formats (group discussion, written input, audio submissions), sensory-considerate environments, and co-facilitation by disabled students. Workshops examined lived experiences of RAPs, barriers to academic and personal support, and ideas for redesigning staff development. Importantly, the workshops did not treat students as subjects of study but as knowledge-producers who identify misalignments between policy and practice. iii) Iterative co-analysis Analysis proceeded through an iterative, participatory process. Disabled student co-researchers coded transcripts, identified thematic clusters, and challenged interpretations that reproduced deficit assumptions. Triangulation across survey datasets, workshop outputs and institutional documentation enabled cross-validation and exposure of contradictions between formal policy claims and lived experience realities. The methodology is shaped by the project's commitment to epistemic justice, distributed expertise, and practical actionability. Research procedures were designed to directly influence the CPD programmes and institutional guidelines being developed. The approach therefore bridges ‘knowing’ and ‘acting’ by embedding research participation in mechanisms of organisational change, aligning with the ECER theme.

Across the survey and workshop phases, a coherent narrative emerged of disabled students navigating support systems marked by inconsistency, fragmentation and avoidable labour. Survey data revealed substantial variation in how effectively academic and personal support was experienced, particularly in the timeliness and clarity of RAP implementation. Many students described having to ‘project-manage’ their own adjustments, coordinating between departments. This pattern exposed gaps between institutional commitments to inclusion and day-to-day realities students encountered. Workshop discussions expanded these findings, difficulties were rooted less in individual circumstances and more in structural design. Students highlighted misalignment between academic and personal support systems, where responsibility for adjustments was dispersed and poorly coordinated. The outcome was an over-reliance on staff goodwill rather than embedded processes, producing uneven experiences. Participants described the emotional and administrative labour required to repeatedly explain needs, chase communication, and interpret opaque decisions about adjustments. Despite mandatory training, staff knowledge remained inconsistent, contributing to misunderstandings of disability-related needs and variable implementation of reasonable adjustments. These insights echoed sector critiques that higher education still lacks a joined-up, co-created approach to disability equality. Students articulated criteria for what meaningful and effective Reasonable Adjustments should entail, including anticipatory design, proactive communication, relational consistency, and recognition of fluctuating needs. These principles challenged the dominant compliance-driven framing, positioning support as a pedagogical and relational practice. Importantly, these findings are shaping development of a national CPD programme for academic and student-services staff built around student-generated scenarios, indicators of effective support, and evaluation tools. Participants reported that workshops enabled collective sense-making and fostered institutional readiness for change, illustrating how participatory research can generate conditions for acting differently. Because these structural challenges and principles of effective support resonate across European higher education systems, the findings have strong international transferability and contribute to a pan-European dialogue on inclusive academic and personal support.

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