Disabled Students Allowance: business as usual in 2015-16?

It is nearly a year since the Scottish Government published the responses to its consultation on Disabled Students Allowance, discussed here, and an announcement on the outcome has yet to be made.

As this post noted, we must be due a general announcement on the 2015-16 Scottish student grant and loan rates very soon.  The arrangements for DSA in the next academic year will surely also need to be clarified soon. It might even be that this could be what the Scottish Government will run as its headline on student support changes, as a counterweight to  the likely freezing of grants and loans and the reporting of the 2013-14 student support statistics, which are bound to show much increased debt and reduced spending on grants.

Those statistics will also show whether the significant drop in DSA spending which occurred in Scotland in 2012-13 was a blip or the start of a trend.   I’ll post on here some further analysis of Scottish spending on DSA, after the figures are published next Tuesday.

DSA spending in other parts of the UK in 2013-14 ought to be available from the SLC on 27 November (see here).