Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
Find clear, practical answers about UDISAS, UDISAS Higher Education, completing the assessment, considering support, receiving your report, and organisational use.
Click the headers below to navigate to the relevant section of the page.
What the platform does, the current Product Edition, and the limits of its role.
How relevant options become available, how choices are made, and where human input remains.
Who the current product is for, how access is provided, and how it relates to Disabled Students’ Allowance (DSA).
What the report contains, how it is delivered, and how it can be used.
Questions, progress, written responses, saving, support, and locked answers.
Organisations, data, and accessibility
Licences, Platform Management, customisation, retention, privacy, and access.
The UDISAS platform
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UDISAS is a digital needs assessment platform. It guides people through questions about activities, barriers, and circumstances, brings connected information together, identifies support strategies and solutions worth considering, and produces a personalised report based on the assessment and the choices made. Its purpose is to support understanding and more informed decisions.
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UDISAS Higher Education is our first product edition based on the UDISAS platform. It is designed around studying for a higher-education qualification and is available through direct student purchase or institutional licences. A university or college may licence UDISAS Higher Education ‘off the shelf’ or discuss how it may be adapted or customised to meet specific institutional needs.
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No. UDISAS does not diagnose a disability, determine statutory status, approve funding, prescribe support, or make an official decision for a university, college, funder, employer, clinician, or other responsible body. It structures information and identifies relevant possibilities. Users, UDISAS assessors, organisations, and external professionals retain their distinct roles and responsibilities.
UDISAS Higher Education
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It is designed for students studying for a higher education qualification and for universities or colleges that want to provide the same assessment journey through institutional licences. A prospective student may also use it with an intended course in mind. The current product edition is not optimised to assess study difficulties in compulsory or further education, while a workplace product edition is scheduled for release in the future.
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No diagnosis, existing source of support funding, or university referral is required to use UDISAS Higher Education. However, you may need to provide diagnostic evidence for reasonable adjustments to be implemented by your university or college, or if you are seeking funding toward the cost of your required support.
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Students can purchase an assessment directly. Universities and colleges can purchase licences and assign access to individual students, selected groups, or wider provision. Once access is issued, the student enters the assessment through a time-limited magic link sent by email rather than creating and remembering a password.
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No. UDISAS Higher Education is an independent assessment. A student may use it before, during, or after another support process to explore their needs and options further, but it is not an official DSA needs assessment or reassessment. Its report does not change entitlement or compell an assessment provider, funding body, university, or college to alter a decision.
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Yes. UDISAS Higher Education is suitable for a student from overseas who is studying at a university or college in the U.K.. Direct purchase may also be technically possible from elsewhere, but this product edition has been designed around higher education activities in the U.K., and access to recommended software or online services may vary by region.
Completing the assessment
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The assessment begins with foundational information, including underlying challenges, any named conditions, previous support, the academic activities your course involves, and the equipment you already use. It then explores relevant activities and barriers in context. A diagnosis or course title is not treated as a complete explanation of your needs.
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Earlier answers unlock questions that are relevant to the person’s circumstances. This means that users do not all follow the same fixed route or answer every question in the system.
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Assessment times vary depending on individual needs, but the information-gathering process of an average UDISAS Higher Education assessment takes around an hour to complete in full. You can take as long as you need to consider support options before finalising the report.
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Yes. As we have taken a detailed and comprehensive approach to exploring activities and difficulties, we encourage you to complete the assessment in stages. You can save your progress and return through a new time-limited magic link while the unfinished assessment record remains within the standard retention period of 365 days.
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Most questions use selectable responses, including a broader response scale where greater nuance is useful. Optional free-text questions allow you to add context when the available selections do not tell the whole story. Every free-text response contributes to the report: identifying details may be used within sentences, while most additional information is reproduced in quotation marks as your own words.
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The percentage is calculated live from the questions already answered and the relevant unlocked questions that remain. When an answer unlocks additional questions, the number still to be completed increases. The percentage can therefore move down as well as up, even though your previous answers have been retained.
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Yes. You can contact UDISAS if you need support. Some answer patterns that appear inconsistent can also initiate contact from a UDISAS assessor; where this happens, the assessment tells you that contact has been initiated. This is a clarification safeguard, not a diagnosis, misconduct check, or judgement that your answer is wrong.
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The assessment-stage confirmation locks the questions before support selection begins. In an organisational bulk-licensing context, an authorised organisational administrator can reverse that question lock. Generating the report creates a later lock across both answers and support selections; only a UDISAS administrator can reverse that final lock. Contact UDISAS if a correction is needed.
Considering support
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The Recommendation Engine uses a computational framework to weigh the extent of the difficulties and challenges identified during the assessment, before connecting them with the profiled functions and benefits of available strategies and solutions. The framework is consistently applied across all assessments, although the mechanics can be customised as part of site licencing arrangements to meet institutional needs.
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No. The platform identifies strategies and solutions that are relevant and available for consideration. You review those possibilities, compare information, ask for help where needed, and decide which options you want to take forward. If your support is due to be funded by a third party, the final decision about which support to take forward may lie with them.
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Different answers can create different assessment profiles, and different approved configurations can contain different available support. Within one configuration, the same inputs produce the same outputs. If UDISAS creates a commissioned client-specific configuration, that resulting configuration applies its own framework consistently.
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You can choose to view only strategies and tools that are compatible with the equipment recorded in your assessment, or view the full relevant set. The preference hides incompatible tools rather than changing the Recommendation Engine process itself. If a strategy contains only incompatible tools, the whole strategy can be hidden while that preference is active.
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During support selection, you can use the Additional Support button to request assessor input. Exceptional or highly specialised circumstances may also be handled manually or referred for specialist review rather than being forced into a standard platform choice. Human involvement helps address the case; it does not guarantee funding, equipment, a referral outcome, or another organisation’s approval.
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An authorised organisation can activate or deactivate configured strategies and tools to reflect what its deployment can make available. It cannot directly change Recommendation Engine mappings, values, weightings, thresholds, or rules through Platform Management. A materially different computational configuration must be scoped and created by UDISAS as a separate service.
Reports and next steps
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The report records the needs and barriers identified through the assessment and explains the strategies and solutions selected for further action. It also carries through the user’s free-text information. Identifying details may form part of constructed sentences, while most additional-information responses are presented in quotation marks as the user’s own words.
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At launch, the platform generates an editable draft for UDISAS to review. UDISAS checks the report, adds any agreed human recommendations where required, and provides the user with a final PDF by email. The final PDF preserves the assessment record in a non-editable form.
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You can use the report to organise your own understanding, explore support, and inform conversations with a university, college, assessor, funder, support provider, or other relevant person. The report does not itself establish a diagnosis, legal entitlement, funding approval, reasonable adjustment, or requirement for another organisation to provide a particular form of support.
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Magic-link access can be requested before, during, and after completion while the assessment record is retained, although answers and support selections cannot be changed once the report has been finalised. The record remains active for the standard retention period of 365 days or until you let us know that you would like the record to be removed. Keep the final PDF provided to you as the completed report rather than relying on permanent platform access.
Organisations, data, and accessibility
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Universities and colleges can purchase licences and assign the same individual assessment journey to a student. Access can be arranged for individual students, selected groups, or wider provision. The organisation retains responsibility for its own policies, professional decisions, funding, adjustments, and support provision.
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Current Platform Management functions support users and licences, assessment assignment and status, recorded-answer review where permissions allow, selection statistics and other analytical metrics, configured support availability, role-based access, human-contact records, and data-handling settings. Deeper inspection of the exact method by which a particular support decision was unlocked is currently in development.
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UDISAS can discuss a commissioned client-specific configuration and can consider white-labelling within a scoped agreement. These are services requiring definition, technical and content work, validation, governance, and commercial agreement. They are not self-service Platform Management controls and should not be assumed to be included within a standard licence arrangement.
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Retention is configurable rather than fixed for every deployment. Authorised administrators can set separate periods for completed and unfinished assessments and choose permanent deletion or pseudoanonymisation when the relevant period expires. The applicable privacy information should explain the setting in use, the responsible organisations, individual rights, and the meaning of each expiry action. The standard retention period for a single-user UDISAS Higher Education assessment is 365 days.
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Access to an assessment uses time-limited magic links. UDISAS applies technical and organisational controls to protect information, but a short FAQ answer is not a substitute for current processing, retention, security, and rights information. Read the maintained Privacy Policy or product privacy notice for the details that apply to your use, and contact UDISAS if you need organisational assurance information.
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The platform is designed to support assistive technologies used to read digital text aloud. Compatibility can vary by technology, browser, device, and configuration, and UDISAS has not tested every assistive technology available. Read the current Accessibility Statement for tested scope and known limitations, or contact UDISAS about a particular access requirement.
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Yes, where the purpose and status are clear. Organisations can evaluate the current UDISAS Higher Education and Platform foundation, discuss partnership or delivery requirements, or explore how a different context could be scoped.
Please get in touch for further information
Some answers may depend on your course, institution, service, deployment, or intended use. Contact UDISAS and tell us what you need to understand.
To protect your data, please do not include assessment answers, health information, case records, or other sensitive personal information in your first message.