Higher education was easily accessible to disabled people during Covid. Why are we being shut out now? | Rosie Anfilogoff

While my friends were flicking through university brochures and choosing Ucas options, I was signing chemotherapy consent forms in the teenage cancer unit at Addenbrooke’s hospital and throwing up in its weirdly tropical island-themed bathrooms.

Suddenly, friends at university were having the kind of experience that would have enabled me to join them.But since the “end” of the pandemic, online learning has withered away and thousands of students have been left without sufficient access.

The return to solely in-person learning ignores everything experts in the field have recommended and, I believe, neglects universities’ legal duty to make “ reasonable adjustments ” to ensure people with disabilities are not disadvantaged.

Students with mobility impairments or executive functioning issues find not having to navigate campus helpful, because they can save their energy for studying, not logistics.

With recent findings by the Institute for Fiscal Studies showing disabled people now make up nearly half of the country’s most deprived working-age adults, surely this is an urgent issue to confront.

They shouldn’t have to settle (while paying thousands of pounds) for a course they aren’t passionate about, purely because there’s no other option – especially when we know the resources exist that would allow them to attend other universities.