Starting college

Find out how to choose the right college for you, and information about financial support and your rights.

If your local college can't offer a course to suit your disability-related needs, you may consider applying to a residential or specialist college. Most of these colleges are independent and cater specifically for students with disabilities or learning difficulties.

Support at college

Find out about the type of support you can receive at college in our college support for students with sight loss pages.

Funding support

Colleges receive funding in order to provide reasonable adjustments and make sure learners with a disability or impairment have the support they require. Find out more on our funding at college page.

Study advice

If you're blind or partially sighted, studying doesn't have to be a chore, but it takes organisation and a bit of forward planning to find out which study techniques work best for you. Visit our study advice page for more study tips and find out how you can access exam materials and libraries!

Transition guides

We've created handy guides for blind and partially sighted young people who are about to move into higher education and work.

Challenging discrimination

Hopefully your experience of college will be a positive one, but if things don’t go quite as planned and you think that you've been treated unfairly because of your vision impairment by a further or higher education provider, such as a college or university, you can complain using the Equality Act 2010. For instance, if you haven’t been provided with the reasonable adjustments you need to help you to access the course independently, you can challenge this further. Find out more about the Equality Act and our “Challenging discrimination by a further or higher education provider” toolkit on our Challenging Discrimination page.