FOI_26-244 Students with Hearing Impairments and available support

Date of response: 20 October 2026

We have now considered your request of 23 September 2026 for the following information:

Question 1.

' Evaluating the Effectiveness and Usability of Assistive Resources for Hearing Impaired Students in Higher Education'

All questions have been provided in accompanying document - FOI_26-244 Appendix A.

Our response:

We regret that on this occasion it is not possible to provide the requested information.

Under Section 1 of the Freedom of Information Act, we can confirm that the University does hold the information requested, however on this occasion it is not possible for us to provide any of the information relating to the number of Hearing Impaired (HI) students receiving Disability funding, the number of HI students receiving Student Support Services and the number of HI students that used exam/assessment access arrangements for academic years 2020-21 through to 2025-26.

We have determined that the cost of finding and assembling the requested information will exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ as defined by section 12 of the Act and the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004/3244.

'The ‘appropriate limit’ of £450, which equates to 18 hours’ work, as defined by the Information Commissioner’s Office, can relate to one request in its entirety or to a series of linked requests. If the University cannot locate, retrieve and extract some or all of the requested information within the 18 hours we are not obliged to retrieve any of the requested information.

Information relating to is held within our Student and Academic Services and Student Journey and Support departments. There is no central record of where this information is held.

For the period outlined in your request we have identified 207 students declaring a Hearing Impairment that are registered with Student Journey and Support, which may fall into the scope of your request. The only way of identifying, extracting and recording the exact information you seek would be to interrogate each individual student file manually.

Regarding students accessing exam assessment access arrangements for all academic years, we would need to examine all reasonable adjustment files to ascertain which students who had self-declared a HI to the University has access exam or assessment arrangements.

For the students accessing Student Support and Disability funding alone, we have calculated it would take 3 minutes per records, or 10 hours, to locate and manually interrogate each individual record. Additional to this, we would need a further 3 minutes to access reasonable adjustments in exam data to provide response to those questions. The total time equates to around 20 hours, which exceeds the appropriate time-limit as outlined above.

Under section 16 of the Act, and to assist you in formulating a request to which we can respond, we can provide full response for all requested years for questions E1, E2, E3, E4, E5, E6, E7 E8 E9, E10 and E11.

We would also be able to provide to you the following responses:

A1 through to A15

M1 through to M4

P1 through to P7

T1 through to T5

X1 through to X3

Please note we have not considered whether any exemptions may apply to such a request.

We should also point out that any revised request you submit will be treated as a new FOI request, and the 20 working-day time-limit will begin again.

We are sorry we cannot provide the data you requested, but trust this response explains our position.