Why we need to talk about neurodiversity in the workplace

Maisie Cass is Founder and Chief Curiosity Officer at Diversity Does, helping schools and organisations to move beyond neurodiversity awareness and make neuroinclusion part of everyday working practice. This blog post is an edited extract from our longer conversation, What About the Adults? Neuroinclusion in Schools | Maisie Cass. 

You don’t stop being neurodivergent when you become an adult

I have worked across all key stages of education; I've worked in mainstream, maintained and alternative provision. Across the past 20 years, there's been so much emphasis out there on how do we better understand our students, how do we support them? How do we make inclusive classrooms? 

Which is brilliant. But somewhere along the way that wasn't translated into the adults in the workplace as well. And yet, if you are neurodivergent as a child, you don't stop being neurodivergent when you become an adult. So our teachers, our members of SLT, our business managers – if you were neuro divergent as a child, whether you knew it or not, you are still going to have a brain that works that way in your workplace.

So when we are looking within education, at recruitment, onboarding, retention, progression, wellbeing, reducing burnout, and really preserving the energy and wonderfulness of our educational professionals, we have to take neurodiversity into consideration. How can we start to reduce those barriers to accessing the workplace in a way that works with our brains and our central nervous systems, rather than against them, in exactly the same way that we do for our students?

We have to do it for everybody who enters that setting right from the moment that they come through the door. Because barriers don't just turn up overnight. They are friction that's accumulated over days, weeks, months, years. 

We need to understand the neurodivergent brain

If we can start to understand how the neurodivergent brain works within the workplace, because we're quite good at understanding the neurotypical brain (which is mostly how organisations are set up), we can start designing more of our practices and processes around that, and we're going to impact and benefit everybody who comes into that setting. 

And it's not just the students, it's not even just the professionals that work in that setting. It's the parents, carers and community that surround that educational setting as well. So if everything is done through that neuroinclusive lens, it really will benefit everybody in the long term. 

On the surface, education should be ideal for the way the neurodivergent brain works. And I know I’m stereotyping and generalising – because the neurodivergent umbrella covers everything. It's not just autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia; it's learning disabilities, it's bipolar, it's acquired brain injuries. 

So when I'm talking about the neurodivergent brain, I am generalising slightly because this won't be the same for everybody. However, when we are looking at some of the things that happen in the workplace, particularly within schools, in theory, it should really suit the way the neurodivergent brain works. 

We have timetables, familiarity, consistency (to a point). We have times when we know that we get downtime, such as half-term and school holidays. We know when our break time and lunchtime is. 

So in theory it should work really well, and yet it's not. We get lots of neurodivergent people coming into education. There is a really high proportion because it suits them so well, they have so much to offer and they really connect with the students. But education settings aren't managing to keep them. 

That's the biggest worry for me. It's not just the fact that we aren't keeping those teachers, but it means that there's a really high proportion of those neurodivergent individuals who are not being able to keep their roles at all.

What can we do to reduce the friction?

But when we're looking at what causes some of the issues, I always go back to the fact that it could just be one tiny thing that is done to remove a little bit of friction within one employee's working day.

And when you can see the result of that one bit of friction that's been reduced or removed, you go, actually that's worked really well. It didn't cost me anything and it took me five minutes. What if I did that for everyone in my team? What if we did that for everyone in our key stage? Just that one bit of friction.

I'll give you a really good example. So we have our internal filing system online. And it's a maze of folders, sub folders, folders within sub folders. 

I used to do a lot of PPA cover in a secondary school. I would go to find the folder that I needed for that classroom, and the class teacher had perhaps named it something that was relevant for them, but not for somebody else coming in. 

So for the first 10 minutes of that lesson, friction was showing up for me as the adult in the room because I had Year 9s that were getting bored, and I was still standing there going, does anyone know what the learning objective is today? Does anyone know what we're doing today? 

I’m getting distracted by finding what's on the computer, where the printouts are. Then that raises anxiety in me because my neurodivergent brain doesn't like that. And that then changes the way I show up and the students pick up on it.

So that one bit of friction could be resolved by everybody labelling their intranet folders in the same consistent way. Yes, it takes a little bit of manpower to do that in the very first instance, but once it's done that one bit of friction can be eliminated. Not just for me, but for the entire staff base. It's brilliant. 

Relationships and communication

A lot of the time, the reasons that I'm brought in to advise in an education setting seem like they could be big issues, but when you sit down and talk about it, actually, they are much easier to navigate. 

One common challenge is actually to do with relationships within teams and how people get on. Schools are one of the most aware sectors when it comes to neurodivergence, SEND, additional needs and doing things in a different way. But because we still very much look through a lens of a student, rather than how that impacts us as an adult, it means that we don't then apply the same strategies and expectations with the teams.

So there can be misunderstandings because people communicate in a different way. Because unmet neurodivergent need can show up in ways that people don't understand and then misinterpret as laziness, or procrastination, as not pulling their weight, or avoidance. 

Whereas actually it's more likely that it's anxiety, overwhelm and not understanding the expectations that are being placed on them.

We need to get curious

In that instance, it's really a case of going in and educating everybody within the school, not just the senior or middle leadership. It's the teachers, the TAs, the learning support; it's whoever supervises the lunches in the canteen, it's the cleaners and the caretaker.

Everybody understands in the very first instance how their brain works for themselves, how their brain processes the workplace around them, but then in turn how that processing communicates with a central nervous system. Because that's where the behaviour and the emotions show up. 

So that's when I get the staff to get really curious. If they're seeing behaviours and emotions, whether they're experiencing them with themselves or they're seeing that within their team, rather than saying, ‘Because we're all so busy, that's causing me a problem. They're not working fast enough. They still haven't gotten that to me,’ it's asking, ‘I wonder what's going on? I wonder what friction is showing up for this person that's creating that behaviour?’

In the same way that we work with our students, we look at the behaviour and ask, what's this behaviour communicating? So you've got that member of staff who seems really blunt and almost standoffish when you try and communicate with them during the school day, and then you'll get emails from them at 3:00 AM the next morning.

But that member of staff might just be finding everything very overwhelming. So in the moment, during the daytime, they haven't actually got any spare capacity to communicate with you or to take on any more. The way they preserve themselves is by taking a step back and being almost blunt, saying, no, I can't do that right now.

But then in the quiet of 3:00 AM when nobody's asking anything of them, all of a sudden they go, OK, I can answer that email now.

Do I just need to try harder?

Then we have the executive function side of things – your prioritisation, your organisation. For many people who have a neurodivergent brain, that's the area that needs more support. That's the area that can become overwhelmed a little bit quicker. 

If you don't know that about yourself, you could just think that you are not very good at your job, or that you are lazy, or you just need to try harder.

If you are a manager of a team, supporting somebody who is struggling with their prioritisation and being organised, or their punctuality, it's looking at that and going, right, what is it that's causing that? What can I do within my own sphere of influence? It might be the tiniest thing that can start to improve that.

There is still this stigma within education, meaning teachers and educational professionals wait until it's too late to say that there's a problem, because there's that worry that it's going to be seen that they're just not good enough at their job.

Or, as in many schools that I’ve been involved with, when you do take a problem to your line manager – the workload is just too much, or there’s been a change in priorities due to sickness and everyone’s had to move around and do everyone else's jobs – it’s met with: ‘it's just the way it is. We've just got to get on with it.’

When you are then met with that, you think, well, I'm not going to tell them again. I'm not going to tell them there's a problem. And that's when we start to lose teachers through burnout. That's when the schools have to pick up the cost of people going on long-term sick and supply agencies as well.

Turnover, recruitment and workload impact

I think that links right back to recruitment. If you have a high staff turnover in your school and for whatever reason, teachers wait until the very last minute to hand their notice in, and then you don't manage to fill that role within your school, it means that come September, it doesn't matter, the students are still coming back, and somebody has to cover that workload. 

Then we get teachers who become two roles. Senior leaders are never just one role anymore. They're the headteacher, designated safeguarding lead, SENCO – they do it all. It can start to get too much. 

When we start to look at how you can really adapt your organisation in terms of the practices and processes that are in place, particularly the behind the scenes stuff, if it can really help to reduce that friction and preserve energy and tolerance in your teams, then you’re going to keep your staff for longer. 

Your retention’s going to be better. You’re not going to have those gaps while you're trying to recruit. Wellbeing will stay higher and you'll have less people going off on long-term sickness or on burnout. 

I think that's such an important part of this conversation. It's a whole ecosystem, because if you are not looking after the day-to-day running, you'll lose your staff. If you’re not changing that, you’re going to struggle to recruit people. Then it becomes a really vicious cycle. 

And yet there are a lot of people out there that you could recruit, if your practices and systems were set up to be inclusive and accessible. 

What next?

• Listen to the full podcast episode: What About the Adults? Neuroinclusion in Schools | Maisie Cass 

• Sign up to the newsletter for ongoing tips, resources and insights
• Create a more consistent approach to curious conversations: Call them honest: conversations to empower, understand and resolve 
• More on why the adults matter: Belonging in schools: are we asking the wrong questions? 
• Sign up for the SBL Support Hub webinar: Leading neurodiverse teams: getting the best from different personality types