Disability Inclusion Partnership

Enhancing Disability Support Systems in Higher Education

The Rix Inclusive Research Institute has secured British Council funding for a Disability Inclusion Partnership between the University of London (UEL) and the Tashkent State Pedagogical University in Uzbekistan (TSPU). The aim is to improve disability support systems in higher education and the project will run from May 2025 to August 2026.

Funding for the project comes from the British Council’s Going Global Partnerships programme and the focus will be on inclusive practices, gender equity, and knowledge exchange. Together with our Uzbek partners we will develop a toolkit which we will pilot for scalability. We hope to build lasting partnerships, develop local expertise, and share learning that will inform policy.

We aim for at least 30% of the participants to be students with disabilities at UEL and TSPU to enable us to explore training needs, support gaps, and inclusive practices, and we will use focus groups and surveys to cover topics such as barriers, support systems, and gender-specific challenges. We will produce a baseline research report by the end of September 2025 and a final report in May 2026.

Roles and responsibilities within the project will be as follows:

UEL
• lead co-ordination
• research design
• toolkit development
• UK training

TSPU
• local implementation
• field research
• toolkit pilot
• stakeholder liaison

Both partners will be responsible for co-delivering training, facilitating exchanges, and co-authoring outputs.

Mark Crossey, Head of UEL Global, highlights the importance of this international partnership:

“Uzbekistan is a growing and increasingly propitious environment for UK transnational education (TNE) partnerships: over 30% of its rapidly growing population of 37m is under 14 years old, and for cultural and historical reasons Uzbeks are highly invested in education for their children and very open to international experiences.
The Uzbek Ministry of Education has developed a favourable climate for TNE in a time of impressive economic growth and looks very much to the UK as a favoured partner. As part of a picture of a country energetically modernising, opening up and engaging in ambitious national reforms, over the last few years the Uzbek government has also focused on better access for its citizens with disabilities, setting up a dedicated government body to address this objective, as well as directly supporting a variety of NGOs in the sector.

Higher Education is also very much part of this focus, and the partnership of the Rix Centre at UEL with the Tashkent Pedagogical University, which is an elite institution working directly to the Minister of Education of Uzbekistan, is really important. This is because the joint work on curriculum reform to support students with disabilities has the potential to be implemented in all of the over 70 public universities in this increasingly important Central Asian country.

Uzbekistan is, the largest country, population wise, in Central Asia and the work happening there has great influence throughout the region. RIX is therefore very well placed, under this partnership, to be a valued partner in both higher education reforms and legislative support for people with disabilities in Uzbekistan.”