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This article outlines the adjustments made to provide an accessible learning environment within the first-year undergraduate curriculum of the languages degree course at Coventry University. Marina Orsini-Jones, Kathy Courtney and Anne Dickinson describe how language staff collaborated with the Centre for Higher Education Development and the Teaching and Learning Support Unit both to raise awareness amongst all students about accessibility issues and to adapt materials for a blind student reading French, German and Spanish. The article includes a discussion of the challenges faced, and provides an action plan for future adjustments to the languages materials in line with the lesson learnt from the case study.

Internationally, changes to academic work are a response to the massification of higher education and a changed and changing higher education context. The majority of these adjustments involve a casualisation of academic work, widely characterised as being of a de‐skilling nature, alongside the emergence of new, as well as changing, roles that typically function across traditional boundaries and frequently involve elements of up‐skilling. The paper points to the value of the latter group of adaptations, characterising them as ‘direct‐response’ changes to new environmental conditions. In contrast, de‐skilling adaptations, classed as ‘indirect‐response’ changes, are viewed as impacting negatively on key aspects of higher education. Inter‐professional teaching practices are advocated as an alternative to the casualisation strategy, based on the belief that it would empower large numbers of existing groups of higher education workers to make a fuller and richer contribution to student learning and help prepare them for an uncertain future.

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