How to Use This Toolkit
This toolkit exists because most higher education teachers want to teach inclusively but are rarely given the specific, practical guidance to do it well. Policy documents tell staff that inclusion matters; they rarely tell a lecturer what to actually do differently on a Tuesday morning lecture, or how to word an email to a student who has just disclosed a mental health condition. This toolkit is written to close that gap.
It is organised in four parts, each answering a different kind of question:
- Part 1 (Foundations) answers ‘why does this matter, and what is my role as a teacher, specifically?’
- Part 2 (Materials and Assessment) answers ‘how do I make what I already do — my slides, my documents, my exams — accessible, without redesigning my whole module?’
- Part 3 (Accessibility Categories) answers ‘what does this specific condition mean for my teaching, today?’ — one chapter per category, each following an identical structure.
- Part 4 (Putting It into Practice) answers ‘what do I actually do in the moment something goes wrong?’ — short scenarios and a one-page checklist.
The toolkit is designed to be read once, cover to cover, during induction or a staff development session — and then used afterwards purely as a reference. Part 3 and Part 4 are built for this kind of repeat, quick use: a teacher preparing a Thursday seminar for a student with dyslexia should be able to open Chapter 12, read the Quick Teacher Checklist, and be ready in under five minutes.
Every chapter uses plain, direct language, short sentences, and a fixed structure, partly because this is simply good practice for a practical staff resource, and partly because the toolkit itself needs to be translated into Uzbek and Russian without losing meaning — idiom and long, complex sentences do not translate well.
Who This Toolkit Is For
- University lecturers, module and course leaders.
- Tutors, teaching assistants, and seminar leaders.
- Laboratory and workshop teachers, and placement supervisors with teaching responsibilities.
- Online and blended-learning educators.
What This Toolkit Deliberately Does Not Cover
To keep this toolkit usable rather than exhaustive, several things are deliberately left out, even though they matter:
- Detailed guidance for disability services, admissions, or estates teams — these have their own specialist procedures and staff, and duplicating them here would make this toolkit longer without making it more useful to a teacher.
- Diagnostic or medical detail beyond what a teacher needs to act — this toolkit is not a clinical reference, and teachers are never expected to diagnose.
- A single fixed answer for every situation — genuine flexibility, informed by what an individual student says they need, will always outperform a rigid script.