How classroom expectations can create barriers for autistic and neurodivergent learners – and how more accessible teaching can reveal what pupils really know.

Over the years, I have taught and tutored children and young people across very different settings, from mainstream classrooms and specialist provision to individual tuition. One thing that has become increasingly clear to me is that, although a learner may undoubtedly have difficulties that need to be understood and supported, the extent to which those difficulties become disabling can depend heavily on the environment in which we expect them to learn.

This distinction is easily lost because schools inevitably need shared expectations. Teachers cannot create an entirely separate curriculum or timetable for every child, and classrooms depend on routines, systems and broadly agreed ways of organising learning. However, practical arrangements can gradually become assumptions about what learning itself should look like, until sitting still becomes associated with paying attention, answering quickly with understanding, working without clarification with independence, and coping quietly with noise, uncertainty or change with being ready to learn.

For some children, these expectations create relatively little additional difficulty. For others, meeting them consumes so much cognitive or emotional energy that the demands surrounding the learning begin to compete with the learning itself.

What are we actually asking a learner to do?

This becomes particularly apparent when we look closely at apparently straightforward educational tasks. A piece of writing, for example, may require a student to understand the question, generate ideas, decide which ideas are relevant, organise them into a sequence, hold instructions in working memory, retrieve vocabulary, spell, punctuate, form letters or type, judge the expected length and monitor the passing of time. Alongside all of this, the same student may be managing sensory distraction, uncertainty about whether they have interpreted the task correctly, or anxiety created by previous experiences of finding similar activities difficult.

The finished piece of writing therefore sits at the end of a much more complicated process than the instruction at the top of the page might suggest. When a student produces very little, it can be tempting to conclude that they lack ideas, vocabulary or writing ability, when the actual barrier may have occurred much earlier in that chain.

I see this frequently in tutoring because working individually with a learner makes it possible to change one element of a task and observe what happens. A student who appears unable to answer a question may demonstrate secure understanding when its language is simplified; another who struggles to write independently may produce thoughtful and detailed work once an open-ended instruction has been divided into a series of more explicit decisions. Sometimes reducing the amount of information that needs to be held in working memory reveals knowledge that seemed to be absent, while removing the demand for handwriting exposes vocabulary and sentence structures that were difficult to see in the original work.

The learner has not suddenly acquired new knowledge or ability during those few minutes. What has changed is the route through which they are being asked to demonstrate it.

When classroom conventions become measures of ability

As an autistic person as well as a teacher and tutor, I am particularly interested in the assumptions that can sit underneath ideas such as attention, independence and engagement. These are important concepts, but they are also surprisingly easy to define according to how a learner appears from the outside rather than what is happening cognitively for that learner.

An autistic student may be listening closely without looking towards the teacher. A learner with ADHD may think more effectively when they are able to move, while a dyslexic student may have sophisticated ideas that become much less sophisticated on paper because transcription requires so much effort. A child experiencing significant anxiety may understand the work perfectly well in a familiar conversation but lose access to that understanding when placed under time pressure or asked to perform publicly.

None of this means that every expectation should be abandoned or that every difficulty originates in the environment. It does suggest, however, that we should be cautious about allowing one particular way of behaving as a learner to become indistinguishable from learning itself.

This is particularly important when we describe children as lacking independence. Independence is sometimes treated as the ability to approach an unfamiliar or loosely structured task without needing support, yet for many learners the difficulty lies not in completing the intellectual work but in identifying what the task requires them to do. Providing structure in those circumstances does not necessarily reduce the level of thinking required; it may simply make the thinking accessible.

I have found this especially relevant for learners who experience anxiety around open-ended tasks. An instruction such as ‘Write a description of this picture’ may appear simple to an adult who can automatically generate a plan, decide where to begin and infer how much detail is expected, but those hidden decisions are part of the task too. Making some of them explicit can allow a learner to devote more of their attention to language, imagery and composition rather than using most of their cognitive resources trying to work out what they are supposed to be doing.

Looking successful and learning successfully are not always the same

There is also a risk in judging accessibility by what we can see. Children learn very quickly which behaviours attract approval and which lead to correction, and some become remarkably skilled at appearing to cope within environments that are actually requiring enormous effort from them.

This is particularly relevant when thinking about autistic masking, although the underlying principle extends more widely. A student may sit quietly while understanding very little, copy what other students are doing before beginning a task, avoid asking questions because previous attempts at clarification have been uncomfortable, or wait to see which book somebody else takes from a bag so that they can follow without revealing that they missed the instruction. From an adult perspective, the lesson may appear to have gone extremely smoothly.

For the student, however, successful participation may have depended upon constant observation, inference and self-monitoring. What looks like independence can therefore sometimes be a carefully constructed performance of independence, and what looks like low support need can reflect a learner’s ability to conceal their uncertainty rather than an absence of difficulty.

My own experience of autism inevitably influences the way I think about this. I am wary of assuming that visible compliance tells us how accessible somebody is finding an environment, because a person can become very good at doing what is expected while simultaneously finding the process exhausting. In education, the pupils who create the fewest immediate difficulties for adults are not necessarily the pupils experiencing the fewest difficulties themselves.

Why should support have to wait for a diagnosis?

Diagnosis can be enormously important. For autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people, it can provide an explanation for experiences that have previously been misunderstood, contribute to a more coherent understanding of oneself and make formal support or adjustments possible. I would not want an argument for more inclusive environments to become an argument that diagnosis is unnecessary, because the two issues are not the same.

At the same time, there is something uncomfortable about an educational system in which relatively ordinary adjustments can become easier to justify once a child has acquired a diagnostic label. A diagnosis may explain why a learner benefits from clearer instructions, greater predictability, additional processing time, reduced sensory distraction or an alternative way of recording an answer, but it does not create the difficulty that made those adjustments useful.

This becomes especially significant when children may wait a long time for assessment or when their needs do not fit neatly within a particular diagnostic category. Teachers will not always know why a learner is finding something difficult, and there will be students who experience substantial barriers without ever meeting the criteria for a diagnosis. We can nevertheless observe what makes learning more accessible and respond to the evidence in front of us.

In many cases, the adjustments involved are simply thoughtful teaching. Breaking a complicated instruction into manageable stages, reducing unnecessary information on a worksheet, checking understanding without putting a learner under public pressure, allowing a little more processing time or making the structure of a task visible are unlikely to disadvantage other students. They may, however, make the difference between a neurodivergent learner being able to demonstrate what they know and appearing not to know it at all.

What changes when the environment changes?

Individual tutoring provides a useful perspective on this because the environment is unusually flexible. I can alter the wording of a question, remove time pressure, change the amount of information visible on a page, provide a model, separate a task into stages or simply give somebody longer to think without filling the silence. Those changes make it possible to investigate where a difficulty is actually occurring rather than assuming that the first unsuccessful response tells me everything I need to know.

A learner who appears to have limited comprehension may understand a text perfectly well once the language of the questions is made more explicit. Someone who seems unable to make inferences may be struggling primarily with the conventions of inference questions, while another learner who produces minimal written answers may give complex and perceptive verbal responses when the transcription demand is removed. None of these observations proves that the learner has no underlying difficulty, but they help locate that difficulty more accurately.

This is why I increasingly think of many learning difficulties as relational. The same child can appear highly capable in one context and profoundly unsuccessful in another because their abilities are interacting with different levels of language, sensory, executive-function and emotional demand.

That does not mean autism, ADHD, dyslexia or other forms of neurodivergence could be made irrelevant if we designed sufficiently inclusive classrooms. Some difficulties are significant across environments, and recognising this is an important part of avoiding an oversimplified version of the social model of disability. Environment does, however, influence the extent to which a difference becomes an obstacle, and it also determines how many additional obstacles we place around the difficulty that was already there.

Accessibility does not require lower expectations

One reason these conversations can become difficult is the fear that making learning more accessible necessarily means making it easier. If a student is given a writing framework, additional processing time or a more clearly structured task, it can appear that the level of expectation has been reduced.

Whether that is true depends on what we wanted the learner to demonstrate. If I am assessing a student’s use of descriptive language, an inability to generate an entire organisational structure from an ambiguous starting point may prevent me from seeing the language skills I intended to assess. If I want to know whether a student understands a text, unnecessarily complicated wording in the questions introduces another demand that may distort the result.

This is particularly important in assessment, because a task can measure far more than we realise. Reading dense instructions, remembering several stages, writing quickly, managing uncertainty and regulating anxiety may all influence the eventual mark even when none of them is the curriculum skill supposedly being tested. Making the route into the assessment more accessible can therefore give us more accurate information about attainment rather than artificially improving it.

The same principle applies within everyday teaching. Scaffolding does not automatically make learning less ambitious, just as removing an unnecessary physical barrier does not change the destination somebody is trying to reach. The important question is which elements of difficulty belong to the knowledge or skill we want a learner to develop and which have accumulated around it because of the way we have chosen to organise the task.

Looking at the environment as well as the learner

Education inevitably involves challenge, and inclusion cannot mean ensuring that students never encounter difficulty. Learning requires effort, persistence and opportunities to develop skills that may initially feel uncomfortable or demanding, and neurodivergent learners should not be denied those opportunities through lowered expectations.

However, intellectual challenge and avoidable obstruction are not the same thing. When a student repeatedly struggles with lengthy verbal instructions, rapid transitions, sensory overload, ambiguous tasks or heavy working-memory demands, it is worth asking whether overcoming those barriers is actually part of what we want them to learn.

For me, one of the most useful contributions of neurodiversity to education has been the invitation to broaden where we look when something is going wrong. Instead of locating every difficulty inside an individual learner, we can examine the interaction between that learner and the conditions in which we are asking them to function.

That changes the questions we ask. Alongside asking why a learner cannot do what seems straightforward to everybody else, we can ask what else they are having to process, tolerate, interpret or manage before they can reach the learning itself; we can consider which parts of the task are essential and which are simply familiar.

Sometimes the answer will still be that a learner needs explicit teaching, practice or specialist support. At other times, however, we may discover that part of the difficulty came from a barrier we had become so accustomed to seeing that we had stopped noticing it was there.

Featured image: adapted from a photograph taken by Kate Coldrick at Finchale Priory, near Durham.

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Written by Kate Coldrick, literacy tutor and educational writer. Explore more of my articles and resources for teaching neurodivergent students at katecoldrick.com and find tailored support for parents at neurodiversitylsc.co.uk.