Dan is 21. He is a student at National Star College in Gloucestershire and, like many others his age, he is absolutely obsessed with playing FIFA. Luckily, his tutor, Simon, is also esports mad. And when the two learned about the AoC Sport FIFA 21 Cup, hosted by the Association of Colleges (AoC) and the British Esports Association throughout lockdown, they were determined that Dan would take part.

However, Dan’s FIFA setup looks a little different to others’, because he has cerebral palsy. He uses a power chair and an eye-gaze communication device. He has four switches connected to an Xbox adaptive controller, which has been remapped so the output is the same as a joystick. He also has two head switches, which replicate the two-button setting in FIFA.

When Dan took part in the competition, he struggled to keep up with other students. In one match, he lost 10-0. But he stuck with it and, afterwards, he told Simon that he wanted to continue to compete, but against students like him.

And so, National Star decided to fulfil Dan’s wishes. Together with three other specialist colleges - Oakwood Court, Hedleys and Aurora Boveridge - the British Esports Association and Microsoft (which owns Xbox), they hosted a pilot FIFA competition for students with additional needs over the course of four weeks.

Some 15 students took part - and they loved it. For many, it was the first time that they’d been able to take part in a form of competitive football, to be able to engage with the sport as more than a viewer.

“It’s been fantastic to see the look on the kids’ faces,” says Tom Dore, head of education at the British Esports Association.

“I know, in education, it’s all about impact, impact, impact. But, actually, when you speak to the kids, when you look at what they’re doing and the enjoyment they are having and the fact that they are interacting with other students in colleges like them, it’s amazing.”

Impact, of course, still matters. But while there has been a lot of research on the impact of esports in mainstream classrooms, little has so far been produced on their value in education for children with special educational needs and disabilities.

Davina Jones is the national lead in policy and research at National Star, and she wants to change that. As well as being an opportunity for students like Dan to find their niche, the competition is a research project - one that’s focused on really drilling down into the value that gaming provides to students with additional needs.

“A lot of our tutors, particularly Simon, have always used gaming in the curriculum,” she says.

“A lot of the conversations we were having anecdotally were around these amazing soft-skill developments that had emerged while young people were taking part in gaming as part of their learning: teamwork, communication, decision making, resilience.

“But we need to take a step back and ask: have these fantastic things really happened? What’s the evidence? So, yes, we’ve seen this amazing practice but we want to try to formalise this now - and provide evidence to show it’s worth us investing time, money and resources in because it makes a difference to future teaching and learning for people with disabilities.”

The research will be published later this year and esports experts are sure it will cement what they already know: that participation in gaming can be transformational for students with additional needs.

Xboxing clever

So, what are the benefits? Hector Minto, Microsoft’s senior technology evangelist for accessibility, has worked with National Star on its assistive technology for decades. He says gaming helps young people with additional needs to develop skills with using devices in ways that other schoolwork doesn’t.

“Imagine you’re somebody with a physical disability and you’re told, ‘Here’s this button, and this button is going to allow you to control your home and control your TV and your voice’. And it’s like: ‘Yes, and what? That’s only going to take me so far’,” he says.

“If you say to students, ‘Right, we’re going to drive cars around the track for the next three hours, you’re going to be practising using your switches there’, the kids will go for that. Students are motivated to play Xbox, and then they will hone their skills with their switches without even realising it.”

Dore says gaming has the potential to incorporate wider curriculum learning, too.

“You can sneak in literacy. For example, you can say to students, ‘Read the instructions for the game’ or ‘Read a how-to guide about getting better at FIFA’. Those texts have a reading age of 15 years old but they don’t need to know that,” he explains.

Both Minto and Dore also highlight the social aspects of esports and the connection it can give to students who, otherwise, can be quite isolated.

And Jones says National Star is currently looking at the way gaming can help with transition from college into adult life.

“For lots of young people, their social networks are through their consoles and, for our students, it’s about getting that balance and understanding how that inclusive social network can be fostered, developed and encouraged as part of a very holistic learning programme to enable the young person to transition to adulthood,” she says.

“One of the biggest issues for our students in the transition, when you’re moving away from a college network you’ve had for years, is that you’re very lonely and you’re very isolated. If there’s something within esports teaching and learning that will enable people to sustain and support, and safely access, those networks for their adult life, that’s brilliant.”

So, what’s next? Will the competition run again next year? And, if so, will it run as a separate event, or will it be in parallel with the mainstream AoC Sport FIFA 22 Cup?

Dore says the plan is definitely to upscale the competition. Now that the pilot is completed, the organisers know what does and doesn’t work, so the competition can be expanded to the 70 specialist colleges across the country.

The biggest hurdle, he says, is access to the adaptive controllers: they aren’t cheap and each student needs theirs to be tailored to their specific needs. But Minto says Microsoft is committed to supporting colleges in this area, and has let all four colleges this year keep the kit free of charge.

“We need to remove any hurdles that stop these specialist colleges from participating,” Dore says.

Fair play

Jones agrees that it’s all about inclusion: “What we don’t want to do is take something mainstream and make a small version of it and isolate it. It’s about saying, ‘We’re running alongside you, we’re still with you, we’ve just made it more equitable’.”

In this drive towards equity, the AoC is keeping pace with developments in the gaming industry, Minto points out. He says that he is increasingly seeing authors introduce more customisation for additional needs into their games.

“They were never really motivated to do that before. One thing to recognise about gaming is: making it easy is not always, politically, the coolest thing to do. But the more that we get that message out there of, ‘Come on, let’s allow people to customise the experience’, people will start optimising their experiences,” he says.

“If you’re playing somebody who doesn’t have all of those supports turned on, you can view that as cheating or unfair advantage, but the community is really getting behind disability gaming so all of that is becoming more acceptable. There will come a time, with the right software support and hardware support, where we can start to see equitable experiences.”

The steps the industry is taking to welcome the disabled community, alongside college-driven initiatives such as the inclusive FIFA cup hosted by National College, mean that Dan, and other esports enthusiasts like him, have many hours on the pitch ahead of them.

Kate Parker is a Tes FE reporter

This article originally appeared in the 23 July 2021 issue under the headline “A game-changer for students with disabilities”