When I am preparing and delivering lectures, are there any legal obligations I need to be aware of?
Lectures, lecture theatres and lecture materials are all listed in the DDA Part IV Code of Practice, amended 2007, as services in the provision of which discrimination should be avoided. (The amendments to Part IV of the DDA re-defined discrimination, and listed 4 kinds: Direct, Failure to make reasonable adjustments, Disability related and Victimisation.) There is no defence for the failure to make reasonable adjustments needed by disabled students. Various considerations can be taken into account when determining what is reasonable.
What adjustments are reasonable to make in relation to lectures may vary according to the nature of institution, its size and resources, and the effect of the disability on the individual student. Factors that might be taken into account in considering what is reasonable would include the maintenance of competence and other academic standards, cost, practicality, and interests of other students. The overall aim is that you should avoid the substantial disadvantage of disabled students in your lectures. For example, you are likely to be disadvantaging substantially a deaf student who is lip-reading if you often turn your back on the class while lecturing.
There is no way I will know in advance who the disabled students are in my class! Yet am I really deemed to know, if the disabled students have told someone else in the institution?
When a student has informed someone within the institution that they are disabled, the institution ‘knows’. This means that communication systems through which you may learn of the particular needs of students in your lectures need to be sufficiently robust for the necessary information to reach you.
In any case the duty to make reasonable adjustments is anticipatory. If you have thought through the possible needs of disabled students in your lectures, then you may have been able to make necessary provisions without knowing all the individual requirements of all disabled students in your lectures. Further, you will obviate the need for disabled students to disclose that they are disabled, which they may anyway wish to request to be kept confidential.
I worry that if I make my lecture notes available on the departmental web-site, students will stop coming to lectures. In what ways might the law require me to give up my lecturing practices?
You perhaps need to consider whether you are prepared to defend practices, however cherished. There is no defence in the DDA Part IV as amended 2007 for the failure to make reasonable adjustments. In determining what is reasonable, you can consider:
It is likely to be difficult to defend the failure to make an adjustment which most or many other lecturers make, unless there are material and substantial reasons why the circumstances or nature of your lecture is different from theirs.
Our departmental budget is never going to be able to pay for subtitling videos, getting lecture notes onto the web, refurbishing lecture theatres and so on. Surely the law cannot require us to provide or change what we cannot afford to provide or change?
Courts will look at the financial resources available to the whole institution, and not particular departments. If you feel that a particular adjustment is required, you may have to refer the matter to those in the university who can make the necessary financial resources available.
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