Testimonial: Patricia Myers OBE, Royal Academy of Dramatic Art

Registrar Emerita

I was immediately struck by D&A’s very passionate and inspirational approach to providing assistive IT training to students in receipt of DSA. They demonstrated this through the encouragement of the use of free Apps, in addition to the standard DSA approved software provided to students, and their suggestion that all students could equally benefit from having access to free Apps which would provide very useful support for their training. Their suggestion was to expand the currently limited provision of assistive IT training through establishing and promoting a series of drop-in workshop sessions, open to all students, not just those in receipt of DSA, who would be steered towards the use of free apps relevant to their particular training with instruction on how to use them effectively on their iPhones or computers.

Many of the D&A trainers are individuals who were in receipt of DSA support themselves when in HE. They are therefore aware of the need for some students to process information and training instructions in a different way and are able to gear their training to support these needs. D&A is a social enterprise which prides its self on collecting feedback from its clients in order to demonstrate its success and extremely positive results. Students are invited to consent to share to enable this feedback to be shared with the various institutions and the DSA as appropriate.

The holistic approach offered by D&A chimed with RADA’s student support policy through which we aim to foster creativity and celebrate the neurodiversity of the student cohort.

We are currently taking advice on a number of Apps recommended by D&A which can be downloaded at RADA and made available at all student computer workstations throughout the Academy to support students on the full range of our courses. We hope to introduce one or more drop-in workshop sessions for non-DSA students later in the spring and summer term and by 2016, to have achieved a more effective and well monitored IT training support system delivered by the D&A trainers.