Intersectional barriers disabled students describe — and how universities can respond

By Student Voice AI

Updated Apr 06, 2026

Disabled students rarely describe barriers as one neat issue. In student voice data, the pattern often appears as scattered signals: a timetable change that breaks an adjustment, a lecture recording that is inaccessible, or a support process that feels unsafe to use. A recent paper in Higher Education by Pascal Angerhausen shows what comes into view when those signals are read through an intersectional lens. For UK universities, that lens helps turn isolated comments into a clearer picture of how stigma, disclosure, and support interact. We summarise what the study found and what institutions can do with that insight. [Paper Source]

Context and research question

Universities have expanded support provision and policies for disabled students, yet students still report stigma, isolation, and avoidable friction in day-to-day learning and support processes. A common reason institutions struggle to act is that disability is often treated as a single category: “disabled students” as one group with one set of needs. That framing can hide which students are facing which barriers, and it makes targeted action harder.

Angerhausen’s study challenges that simplification. It uses an intersectional lens to explore how disability interacts with other factors, including socio-economic background, gender identity, and cultural background, to shape study experience. That complements work on conditional belonging in higher education, where students’ willingness to participate and seek help also depends on context. It also asks what kinds of institutional responses are likely to reduce disadvantage rather than reproduce it.

Methodologically, the paper draws on biographical-narrative interviews with 33 disabled students at a single German university, analysed using Straussian Grounded Theory. The goal is not to create a single “model answer” for all contexts, but to surface patterns in how barriers are lived and explained by students themselves. For institutional teams, the value is practical: it helps distinguish a broad accessibility issue from a barrier that hits some disabled students more sharply than others.

Key findings

First, the study highlights how financial pressure can be a disability issue, not just a cost-of-living issue. The authors describe how gaps and constraints in public funding systems translate into stress, extra labour, and a heightened sense of time pressure to “finish”. Those pressures can be especially acute when disability already makes studying slower or less predictable.

"Disabled students often face financial burdens … leading to experiences of stress and pressure to complete their studies."

Second, the findings show how class background shapes what support feels possible. Students from lower educational or economic backgrounds described added pressures where families did not recognise the value of higher education for independence, which intensified tensions around identity and legitimacy. In practice, this can make disclosure, help-seeking, and persistence harder, even when formal adjustments exist on paper.

Third, the paper surfaces distinct gendered barriers in how impairments are understood and discussed. The study reports “medical gaslighting” experiences for female students, alongside fears among male students that accepting and disclosing impairment could be read as a “loss of masculinity”. For universities, the key point is that disclosure is not merely administrative: it is socially risky, and that risk is unevenly distributed.

Finally, the study argues that these barriers are sustained by wider ableist norms. Inclusive practice should aim to reduce the need for repeated individual negotiation. The authors point to inclusive educational practices such as universal design to reduce stigma and enable participation, while also calling for wider use of intersectional methods so institutions do not flatten complex realities into averages. The institutional takeaway is simple: the best support reduces repeated effort, not just the severity of individual problems.

Practical implications

For UK Student Experience teams, disability practitioners, and senior leaders using NSS or module evaluation data, the paper suggests a shift in how we listen:

Analyse disability-related feedback intersectionally where possible. “Disabled vs non-disabled” is often too blunt to guide action. Break down findings by course, mode, socio-economic indicators, gender, and other characteristics where your data governance allows, then use qualitative comments to understand why gaps appear. That gives teams a better basis for targeted interventions, especially when non-response bias in student evaluations may already be shaping whose comments you see.
Treat finance and time pressure as experience drivers. Disabled students may face additional costs, such as specialist equipment, travel, and healthcare, alongside a higher administrative load for adjustments. Track where students mention money, delays, and bureaucracy in open text, then remove friction points and improve signposting. That helps institutions tackle barriers students actually feel in the week-to-week reality of study.
Design for safe disclosure and help-seeking. If students experience disclosure as risky, they will avoid it. Use student voice comments to identify where processes feel judgemental, repetitive, or inconsistent, then redesign around named case ownership, clear timelines, and “tell us once” principles. The payoff is a support system students are more likely to use early.
Shift from individual fixes to inclusive defaults. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and accessible-by-default communications reduce stigma because they do not require students to repeatedly justify needs. Use free-text feedback to identify common breakdowns, including recordings, captions, document formats, room changes, and assessment clarity, then prioritise fixes that help the whole cohort. That aligns with what deaf and hard of hearing students say makes higher education accessible, where repeated follow-up is itself part of the burden.
Close the loop publicly. When students take the risk of describing disability-related barriers, visible “you said / we did” follow-through builds trust and makes future feedback more likely to be honest and specific.

This is where Student Voice Analytics becomes useful. It helps universities categorise and benchmark disability-related themes in free-text comments, including accessibility, support responsiveness, stigma, communications, and assessment friction, and compare how those themes vary by cohort and demographic with one reproducible method. If you want to move from isolated anecdotes to institution-wide evidence, see how Student Voice Analytics supports governed analysis of disability-related feedback. Then use the student comment analysis governance checklist to plan segmentation, redaction, and follow-up.

FAQ

Q: How can we use student feedback to identify the biggest barriers for disabled students?

A: Combine targeted open-text prompts (e.g. “What made it easier or harder to access learning this term?”) with segmentation by course and cohort. Look for recurring “friction” themes, such as inconsistent adjustments, inaccessible resources, delays, and poor handoffs between teams, then prioritise the changes that remove repeated effort for students.

Q: What are the limits of this study’s methodology for institutional decision-making?

A: The study is based on 33 narrative interviews at a single university, so it provides depth rather than prevalence. UK institutions should treat the findings as hypotheses to test against their own student voice data, for example by triangulating interview-style insights with NSS or module evaluation comments and service-level metrics such as response times, repeat contacts, and case closure rates.

Q: What does an intersectional lens change about how we interpret disability-related student voice data?

A: It shifts the question from “What do disabled students need?” to “Which disabled students experience which barriers, in which contexts, and why?” That change matters because one-size-fits-all interventions can reduce barriers for some students while leaving others behind, or even increase stigma and disclosure risk.

References

[Paper Source]: Pascal Angerhausen "An intersectional perspective on disabled students’ experiences in German higher education" DOI: 10.1007/s10734-025-01541-w

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