How do we train managers on neurodiversity?

You are reading this because a near-miss has landed on your desk. A neurodivergent employee says their line manager waved away an adjustment request, or a grievance has come in with the word “tribunal” in it, and a director has asked the one question you cannot yet answer well: are our managers actually trained on this? If the honest reply is “there was a webinar a couple of years ago,” this is the article for you.

Why manager training is now a legal exposure, not a nice-to-have

Your line managers are the point where the reasonable-adjustments duty is either honoured or breached, because they are who a neurodivergent employee turns to first. The Buckland Review of autism employment, the government-backed review published in February 2024, found the immediate line manager is the person most autistic staff approach for support. So the manager is not a delivery channel for your policy. They are the policy, in practice, on the day.

That duty is real and statutory. Under the Equality Act 2010 you must make reasonable adjustments where a disabled worker is put at a substantial disadvantage, and you must not discriminate against them because of something connected to their disability (Equality Act 2010, s.20-21 and s.39). Autism, ADHD and dyslexia usually meet the legal test for disability, but each is assessed individually on its facts, so never tell a manager that a named condition automatically qualifies (Equality Act 2010, s.6). The lawyerly point a vendor workshop will not make: there is also a defence in the Act if you took all reasonable steps to prevent discrimination, and recorded manager training is exactly the kind of step that defence is built from (Equality Act 2010, s.109).

Now the scale of the gap. The CIPD’s 2024 Neuroinclusion at Work report found only 27% of employers train line managers on what neurodiversity is, 24% on how to support neurodivergent staff, and 18% on how to respond when someone discloses. Only 46% of managers said they felt confident supporting a neurodivergent employee. Read those numbers the way a tribunal would: most managers are making it up.

Acas published fresh guidance in January 2025, and its supporting research is blunter still. 45% of line managers said they lacked their organisation’s knowledge of neurodiversity, 59% did not know how to make a reasonable adjustment, and 39% found the adjustments conversation difficult. The figure that should shape your whole design: 72% of neurodivergent employees do not disclose. Your training has to work even when no one tells the manager anything.

If you want the employee-side view of what your managers are getting wrong, it is worth reading what we tell staff: see can my employer refuse my reasonable adjustments and what happens if we fail to make reasonable adjustments.

What the training must actually cover (beyond awareness)

Awareness is the floor, not the goal. Acas is clear that training “does not have to be long or complicated,” but it has to move a manager from knowing neurodiversity exists to being able to handle an adjustment and avoid discriminating. A slide deck of conditions teaches the first and none of the second.

Drawing the common thread through Acas, the CIPD and Buckland, a real programme covers five things:

• What the conditions mean at work. Not the clinical criteria, but how ADHD, autism, dyslexia or dyspraxia can show up in communication, planning, feedback and pace, so a manager reads a missed deadline as a possible barrier rather than a character flaw.
• The Equality Act duty in plain terms. What a reasonable adjustment is, that the bar is “substantial disadvantage,” and that the manager does not get to decide a request is unreasonable on their own.
• How to have the adjustments conversation. The single most-avoided skill: 39% of managers told Acas they find it difficult. Practise it.
• How to use your own policy. The neurodiversity or adjustments policy, the disclosure route, and where occupational health fits.
• Decoding behaviour, not character. Acas explicitly warns managers off judging someone on eye contact, social conduct or “culture fit.” This one is load-bearing for recruitment and for performance management.

Strengths, not just accommodation

Buckland’s recommendations push past the deficit-and-accommodate habit. Train managers to spot a mismatch between the task and the person, then reshape the task to the strength, and to use mentors or buddies. A common worked example from Acas: talking a dyslexic employee through written correspondence rather than emailing it cold, or letting a support worker attend a formal meeting. The thread running through every example is the same. Adjustments are individual. The minute a manager reaches for a fixed checklist, they have stopped doing the job. Occupational health advises; it does not decide for the person.

For concrete starting points managers can borrow, our answer pages on adjustments for an autistic employee and adjustments for an employee with ADHD give the texture without pretending it is a template.

How to structure the programme: tiered, not one-off

Build it in three tiers so you capture every manager once and your line managers more deeply, rather than running a single grand session half your managers miss. Acas advises folding the basics into existing equality and inclusion training and keeping it light. That is your first tier.

1. Tier 1, a mandatory baseline for all managers. Short, built into the equality and inclusion training you already run, so nobody slips through. This is awareness plus “what to do when someone tells you something.”
2. Tier 2, capability training for line managers. The adjustments conversation, performance management and recruitment, run in depth. Repeat it quarterly or twice a year, because the gap the CIPD measures is widest exactly where manager churn is highest. New managers arrive untrained constantly; a one-off event cannot catch them.
3. Tier 3, just-in-time support. No manager can memorise everything, and they should not try. What they need is the route: HR, occupational health, the policy, and Access to Work. A manager who knows where to go is safer than one who half-remembers a slide.

Two things make or break the design. First, give managers the time and the authority to act. If a manager cannot release a few hours or a small budget for an adjustment, you have trained them to identify a need they are powerless to meet, which is worse than not training them at all. Second, build it with neurodivergent staff, not at them. Collaboration with employees and staff networks was one of Buckland’s headline conclusions, and lived-experience input is the difference between a session people remember and a deck delivered into the void.

The tools that make trained managers effective

Training only sticks when managers have something to reach for, so put four tools in their hands and teach them to use each one.

The workplace adjustment passport

A passport is a portable record of the adjustments already agreed with an employee, so the agreement survives a change of manager or role instead of being re-litigated each time. The Civil Service model, in the Charity for Civil Servants’ July 2025 template, structures it around five headings: Communication, Health, Environment, Change and Knowledge. Train managers to open it, honour what is in it, and review it with the person rather than treat it as a one-time form. We have a fuller walkthrough at how to write a reasonable adjustments passport.

Access to Work, and an honest warning about it

Access to Work is the government scheme that funds assessments, equipment, support workers and job coaches for disabled employees, with a grant cap of £69,260, which the DWP has frozen through the 2026-27 year. Managers should know it exists and how to point an employee at it. They should also know its current state. The National Audit Office reported around 62,000 applications awaiting a decision in February 2025, with waits running up to roughly 38 weeks for employed applicants and far longer for the self-employed. The DWP is recruiting 480 caseworkers to clear the backlog by September 2027. The practical instruction for managers: do not wait on Access to Work before making interim adjustments you can fund directly. The duty is yours now, not the DWP’s in nine months. See what Access to Work does for employers.

An accessible policy and disclosure route

Because 72% of neurodivergent employees do not disclose, managers have to be able to offer adjustments without demanding a diagnosis or a label. An adjustment does not require a doctor’s note to be reasonable. The policy and disclosure route exist so the manager has somewhere to send someone and a basis to act early.

Disability Confident as the frame

The DWP’s Disability Confident scheme gives you a structure to hang commitments and evidence on, and the CIPD’s Neurodiversity at Work guidance (which Buckland recommended employers publicise) is the reference resource to point managers at when they want more.

Proving the training happened: the evidence trail

If you cannot show the training happened, for these purposes it did not. The “all reasonable steps” defence and the reasonable-adjustments story both depend on a record, and an undated, unattended webinar from two years ago is not a record. Capture attendance, dates and content, every time.

Then measure the right thing. Satisfaction scores tell you whether people enjoyed the session, which is not the question. Behaviour change is.

• Did adjustment requests go up? Counter-intuitively that is the good sign: it usually means disclosure rose because people trust managers to respond.
• Did the time from request to adjustment in place fall?
• Did manager confidence move off the CIPD’s 46% baseline in your own pulse survey?

Refresh on an annual cycle and catch every new manager, because that is where the gap reopens. Tie the whole thing to Disability Confident renewal and to any voluntary disability and mental-health reporting you do, so there is an external hook holding you to it. And keep one honest caveat in front of managers throughout: training lowers risk and improves practice, but it does not make any condition automatically a disability, and it does not make any single adjustment automatically reasonable. That is always individual, always contextual. A manager who over-promises creates the next grievance.

What to do this quarter

You can have a defensible programme designed inside one quarter. Not polished, not perfect, but real and recorded, which beats the webinar you are replacing on every measure that matters.

1. Weeks 1-2. Audit what exists. Pull the dates and attendance of any past neurodiversity training and check your policy and disclosure route are findable. If you cannot locate them in two minutes, neither can a manager at 4:50pm with an employee waiting.
2. Weeks 3-5. Write the Tier 1 baseline into your existing equality and inclusion training and schedule the first Tier 2 line-manager session. Co-design both with a neurodivergent colleague or staff network.
3. Weeks 6-8. Put the tools in place: adopt an adjustment passport, brief managers on Access to Work and its backlog, and write one plain instruction that they may fund interim adjustments themselves.
4. Weeks 9-12. Run the first session, record it properly, and set your baseline measures so next quarter you can show movement, not just activity.

If you only do one thing, do the Tier 2 line-manager session and record it. That is the tier the law cares about most and the one nearly every employer skips.

This article is general information for employers, not legal advice on your specific case. Whether a particular person is disabled, and whether a particular adjustment is reasonable, turns on the facts and may need advice from an employment lawyer or your occupational health provider. The statutes and sources behind it are the Equality Act 2010 (s.6, s.20, s.21, s.39, s.109), the Buckland Review of autism employment (2024), Acas’s neurodiversity guidance (2025), the CIPD Neuroinclusion at Work report (2024), and the National Audit Office’s 2025 reporting on Access to Work.