How to use the blueprint 

Find out more about how to develop your transition support for disabled students.

For the purposes of this blueprint, we have defined the transition period as including the students’ first term while they settle into their higher education provider (HEP) environment and begin their course. 

View the blueprint here

Although you may wish to implement standalone, single activities/interventions (for example, welcome events), we recommend applying a more holistic, multi-intervention approach by embedding transitions support across all aspects of student and staff academic life.

Transition support should be included in staff induction activities, and, over time, activities should be embedded in the transition process for all students entering HE. This should include targeted outreach and support to specific groups (for example, by condition or broad grouping, such as neurodivergent students) as needed. 

We recommend that you use the stepped approach outlined below to develop your disabled students’ transition support.

Step 1: Identify 

  1. Conduct an audit of disability-related services, support and initiatives that are currently available at your HEP.
  2. Use data already available within the institution to identify any inequalities in outcomes. Data might include a combination of institutional data and the results of programme or project evaluations with disabled students.
  3. This step may also involve collecting new data through surveys or panels with students to better understand both current support provided and gaps in provision.

Step 2: Clarify

  1. Use the blueprint to map support currently available and to identify the gaps in existing support, systems and processes. Go through the same process to highlight both:
    • Gaps in outcomes. For example, you may find that disabled students have multiple opportunities to engage with current students, but parents and supporters have no opportunity to find out about the support available to disabled students and;
    • Inequalities in outcomes. For example, your internal data might tell you that disabled students are at greater risk of dropping out in the first term than their non-disabled peers. Further investigation might reveal that disabled students have little or no opportunity to experience life on campus prior to attending the HEP which could affect students’ sense of belonging, leading to students being at a higher risk of dropping out.
  2. Based on findings, clarify which areas – where gaps in support and inequalities in outcomes have been identified – offer the most scope to be changed and the potential to have the most impact. Consider the input needed to be able to deliver the activities. Your focus may be at any point in the student transition journey from pre-offer to post-entry.

Step 3: Using the blueprint to develop a theory of change

  1. Having identified the areas to address, use the blueprint to plan the desired changes to the implementation of your transition support. 
  2. The assumptions that underpin each of the activities are key to this step. It is important that the assumptions can be fulfilled to increase the likelihood of your programme being successful and to optimise their delivery. We suggest that you closely examine these assumptions when building your programme of support. All assumptions associated with a specific activity are indicated by the blue boxes in the blueprint. The blue boxes in the blueprint link to the set of assumptions linked to the activity.
  3. At this stage it is important to start to develop your theory of change. See TASO’s theory-of-change guidance here. Developing the theory of change will allow you to map how activities/sub-interventions lead to short, intermediate and long-term outcomes, ultimately illustrating how your transition support is theorised to achieve your final impact. The blueprint will help you identify and develop relevant outcomes. You may also find  TASO’s post-entry Mapping Outcomes and Activities Tool (MOAT) and the three HEP Enhanced Theories of Change developed as part of this project helpful:
    1. Post-entry Mapping Outcomes and Activities Tool (MOAT)
    2. The University of Bath: Supporting transition to Bath for students for lived experience of Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) (PDF)
    3. The University of Birmingham: Supporting conversations about Reasonable Adjustments in Personal Academic Tutorials (PDF)
    4. City College Norwich: A package of activities to support the transition into higher education for disabled students in college-based higher education (PNG)
  4. Developing a robust theory of change requires identifying key change mechanisms. Changes mechanisms are linked to outcomes and are indicated by the circle containing the letters CM followed by a number in the blueprint. The change mechanisms explain how the activity/programme is expected to lead to the anticipated outcomes and impacts.

Change mechanisms are explicit and describe the underlying processes that drive change. Think of them as the active ingredients that are needed to improve the likelihood of the outcomes.

Change mechanisms can be conceptual or operational, and they can be classified into various types, such as behavioural, cognitive, social, organisational and policy mechanisms. Change mechanisms can be evidence-based – for example, evidence from other contexts suggests that early engagement with disabled students helps to develop a sense of belonging in HE.

Change mechanism example

If one of your desired outcomes is to ‘Increase HEPs’ positive engagement with current students’, this is linked change mechanism, CM1 (See the change mechanisms listed in the Enhanced Theory of Change here):

Early engagement with HEPs ➛ students integrate the lived experience of their disability with the HE journey ➛ improved knowledge and/or increased confidence and trusting relationships with staff and support services.

The change mechanism, or active ingredient (‘students integrate the lived experience of their disability with the HE journey’) leads to the short-term outcome that they are more likely to have increased confidence and trusting relationships with staff and support services. The intermediate outcome is that a trusting relationship means that students are more likely to share information about their disability with staff, which means that they are more likely to receive the support required. This in turn leads to the longer term outcome that disabled students are more satisfied with HE, with improved wellbeing and self-determination.

Step 4: Build

  1. Having identified the outcomes and change mechanisms in your theory of change, the next step is to determine how best to deliver transition support to achieve the desired outcome.
  2. Use the blueprint to track from outcomes to the activities that will support you to achieve your outcomes. Build these into your theory of change.
  3. Revisit the assumptions underpinning the activities, and make sure these are built into your theory of change. It may be that your outcomes need to be amended to take account of the assumptions.
  4. Design your new programme of activities by dovetailing them with what is already being implemented at the HEP. To ensure that you are adopting an evidence-informed approach to transition support, when introducing new activities to your suite of support it is important that both the new activities and those that you currently deliver are informed by evidence. This may mean that you need to amend existing activities or stop delivering particular activities.
  5. It may be useful to involve other stakeholders with the relevant knowledge and expertise to help deliver the activities.
  6. Keep your own institution and context in mind when considering what might work for disabled students and what you are able to offer bearing in mind existing capacity and resources.

Step 5: Implement and evaluate

  1. It is important to monitor and evaluate your programme of activities, to establish: what works well; what aspects might need improvement; and whether your theory of change needs to be amended. All of which helps to build the evidence base for what works to support disabled students’ transition into higher education.
  2. We recommend using Steps 2, 3 and 4 of TASO’s Monitoring and Evaluation Framework (MEF) to develop your evaluation work.
    1. MEF Step 2 is Plan. You will need to use your Theory of Change to develop the questions that your evaluation will seek to answer. These overarching questions will determine the scope and approach of your evaluation.
    2. MEF Step 3 is Measure. This will help you plan your data collection and analysis.
    3. MEF Step 4 is Reflect. It is crucial and findings from evaluations are shared to enable learning

TASO’s Monitoring and Evaluation Framework (MEF)

Monitoring and evaluation framework. A diagram with a circle in the centre, with numbers 1,2,3,4. 1 leads is a box labelled 'diagnose'. 2 leads to a box labelled 'plan'. 3 leads to a box labelled 'measure'. 4 leads to a box labelled 'reflect'.

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