Support of students with special needs at the Technical University of Denmark

Abstract

A growing number of students with special needs have been attending engineering programmes at our university, the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). This is a general tendency, which has been observed in all higher educational institutions in Denmark, like vocational schools, colleges and universities. The situation seems to be the same in many other European countries, however there are different ways of handling student support across Europe. For years, Denmark did not have common rules for student support at higher educational institutions. This changed with a governmental legislation and administration law called Special Educational Support - in Danish: Special Paedagogisk Stoette (SPS). The law was introduced in order to equalize the biggest differences on this area. After the introduction of the new law, there are still some differences in the way support is provided across the institutions but these are differences in some specific aspects of the support. This paper presents in general the Danish way to support students with disabilities at higher educational institutions and describes some variations across the different institutions. Furthermore, the paper describes in detail how support is being conducted and established at the Technical University of Denmark and illustrates some of the related challenges. Finally, we share some observations and considerations on group assignments and describe five new DTU initiatives concerning students with special needs.