Imagine a teacher in a classroom turns to the blackboard and writes in text this size. The students would need binoculars to read what’s on the board.
Then the teacher relents and writes in text the size of the headline. Now half the students can read it. So the ones with 20:20 vision are moved down the back and the taller ones are moved out to the side so they don’t get in the way.
It’s a bit messy. The solution, of course, is to get the teacher to communicate in a way that works for 80 per cent of the class. Isn’t it?
That conclusion sounds a bit daft but it’s actually the situation that exists in many Irish education settings for people with disabilities. Catering for the average human has been a design feature in society since the dawn of time. For those whose abilities drift further and further from this supposed ‘average’ human, accessing a basic service like education becomes ever more difficult.
Moving ahead
Dara Ryder is the Chief Executive Officer of AHEAD, an independent non-profit organisation that works to make access to third level and the world of work a normal part of life for people with disabilities.
Our conversation begins by discussing the concept of ‘Universal Design’, a buzzword that has been hanging around but one that many people are unsure of its meaning.
Dara cites the UN definition shown on the page here and points out that the concept is not specifically aimed at people with disabilities.
“It’s an idea about recognizing variability within the human population and trying to design accordingly,” he says, pointing out that the traditional way to be inclusive was to make changes whenever someone with a disability showed up at a school or college. When the next disabled person arrived, different changes would be made.
Universal Design asks course designers, architects and teachers to think about how education will be delivered and make it as open as possible. And if they do that they will be catering for not just disabled people but for older people, the very young, people whose hearing isn’t very good and so on.
Dara cites something said by a participant at one of AHEAD’s webinars. He said that: ‘disabled people can help you predict the future’. For example, automatic doors were originally designed for disabled people but now are widespread in shopping centres to cater for buggies, deliveries, crowd management or just for people with their arms full of shopping.
The idea of not having steps into buildings took a long time to be accepted but who would now design a step going into a public building, even if it we just for insurance considerations?
“So that’s kind of what we think about in the physical environment, but universal design isn’t actually just about the physical environment.
“There is actually a number of specific frameworks within educational landscape, Universal Design for Learning is a very specific one that is actually looking at the pedagogical research on teaching and learning and adapting those concepts,” he says.
“We think all of these challenges are interconnected, the challenges in the physical environment, the challenges in accessibility in the digital environment in our colleges, as well as how our support services are designed, how the actual teaching and learning is designed and delivered in the first place.”
Universal Design for Learning
Dara is keen to talk about the specific framework around the idea in the education sphere which is called Universal Design for Learning or UDL. The UDL guidelines were originally conceived by the US organisation CAST and have been widely used in a range of educational settings. Much of the analysis is based around the idea that there are many reasons why learners are motivated to learn, and many differences in how they navigate the learning process.
The three core principle of UDL are shown in the graphic below. On the first, multiple means of engagement, Dara says that this is about the ‘why’ of education.
“It’s recognizing that learners will come to our classrooms with different motivations, different educational backgrounds, different identities from the ethnicity point of view, from maybe a disability point of view, and a whole range of other reasons.
“For example, increasingly in tertiary education we have a lot of parents in our classrooms.”
So what is required is a variety of ways for learners to connect and engage with the material.
The second principle ‘multiple means of representation’ is largely about the means in which the learning materials are delivered to the learner. In terms of disabilities it obviously means dealing with sight or hearing problems. But there are other ways in which traditional learning settings clash with modern teaching practice.
Dara cites traditional tiered lecture hall seating, which sets people apart immediately, whereas the need for students to collaborate is an important part of modern learning.
Finally, students must be able to express or communicate in the ways that best suit them.
“So that’s basically saying to our teachers that people will show up in different ways in the classroom. They will express their knowledge and their talents in different ways. So if we don’t allow for that how we design our teaching and learning experiences, then we are potentially blocking some people from being able to learn and be able to showcase their talents.
“How do we ensure that we have variety in our modes of assessments or even choice in our modes of assessment so that people can demonstrate that they’ve met the learning outcomes of the course in a variety of ways?”
He points out again that this broader accessibility is not just in the interests of the disabled but also of the wider economy.
“This isn’t just a kind of nice little inclusion, happy clappy sort of woke thing off over in the corner here, it’s actually about serving the knowledge economy of Ireland.”
This knowledge economy depends on mass participation in third level education and UDL can be a template for reasons why learners are motivated to learn, and many differences in how they navigate the learning process.
Accounting for diversity
Asked about the figures for disabled people in particular Dara cited AHEAD’s own statistics which have been compiled since 1994. AHEAD’s figures showed that in the previous 14 years, there was a 319 per cent rise in the numbers of students engaged with disability support services, around 7 per cent of third level students.
Figures from the Higher Education Authority show that up to 20 per cent of students may have some disability. These figures relate to new entrants to the system and are based on anonymous surveys where people indicate disabilities that may affect them.
What’s clear is that the situation had been changing rapidly and the system is struggling to keep up.
“So you have a couple of things going on there. You have, first of all, a rapid rise in the number of people engaging with support services, which is causing this huge pressure on that reactive model that I talked about, this add-on model of individualized supports.”
He says that the support staffing has increased but not at the same pace as demand. AHEAD’s statistics show that in the years between 2013 and 2023 there was a 43% increase in the students to support staff ratio.
Almost ‘a victim of its own success’ he characterises the rise in diversity at third level. It has been a struggle to help institutions and staff keep up with demand and developments.
So AHEAD with their partners in UCD, and also in partnership with the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning, developed a 25-hour digital badge course for academic staff in and around the area of Universal Design for Learning. Nearly 5,000 staff in further and higher education have taken the course since it was introduced in 2017.
Moving up
Then AHEAD carried out research to see how Universal Design was being accepted across the various sectors of tertiary education.
What they found was that there was an evident commitment to universal design within national policy, and lots of examples of engagement from the ground, but it was often missing at the strategic levels of institutions.
At the same time funding to implement Universal Design was being made available to colleges and universities.
Dara says that AHEAD feared that this spending would be piecemeal on individual projects, on a once-off basis, without any joined-up thinking involved. So AHEAD organised a ‘hackathon’ based on the Path 4 funding stream from the HEA for all the people who were deciding how this money would be used.
“What that all resulted in was the development of a project to develop a national charter for universal design in tertiary education. The charter is very specifically targeted at addressing that gap of the strategic level of our institutions,” he says, referring to the ALTITUDE Charter aimed at all tertiary education institutions.
The vision for the charter is: ‘Tertiary education institutions where all learners are transformatively included through Universal Design in education.’ (deriving the name ALTITUDE).
What is the purpose of the ALTITUDE Charter and how will it impact the institutions it’s aimed at?
“It’s how do we think about, over time, gently inserting Universal Design right across the strategic infrastructure of our institutions. So it’s looking at, for example, how do we look at Universal Design in our procurement process so that when we buy in digital systems or when we procure building contracts, that it’s a core part of our criteria to begin with.
“And when we look at things like quality assurance processes in teaching and learning, like program validation, how are we signposting and encouraging and leveraging those processes to get more Universal Design practice happening on the ground.”
Working at ALTITUDE
The charter was launched in March 2024 and the ALTITUDE project team have been working with colleges, universities and Education and Training Boards since to encourage its adoption.
On April 9th 2025, the project team partners are encouraging all tertiary institutions who are ready to adopt or have adopted, to release a public web statement declaring their support for and adoption of the ALTITUDE Charter and their support for a national call to action for institutions and agencies to work towards a more universally designed tertiary education system.
Dara acknowledges that it’s not an easy process for already busy institutions but that the goodwill is there.
Universal Design is here to stay and will be a work in progress in the years ahead. The futures of many thousands of Irish students depend on having a system they can use.
—————————
A route to employment – The WAM Programme
The WAM Employment Programme collaborates with leading Irish employers to offer ring-fenced, full-time, mentored work placements for graduates with disabilities, paid at the appropriate level.
Since 2005, The WAM Programme has placed over 700 graduates with disabilities into a range of multi-national and public sector employers in Ireland. 80 per cent of our WAM graduates secure employment as a direct result of WAM. 94 per cent of WAM graduates gain confidence in their ability to work in a mainstream environment.
Encourage any students or graduates you work with who are seeking employment to sign up to the WAM database so they can hear about our opportunities as they arise at ahead.ie/wamworks.
