The Dispatch
Optimising learning for neurodiverse students
Meeting students where they're at is unlocking a wealth of talent.
By Chloë Lane
"The key to meaningful learning is the ability to fully participate and to do that in a safe environment."
“Inclusion is also now viewed as mainstream rather than a specialist provision.”
“Seeking support is normal and encouraged, and that it is part of how students navigate their learning journey, not a sign of difficulty or failure.”
“Entrepreneurship can provide a context where neurodiverse characteristics are productively leveraged.”
In brief
- Universities are redesigning curricula and governance to meet the needs of neurodiverse students and help them thrive in academic and professional life.
- Institutions are deploying staff training, AI-driven transcription tools, and flexible one-on-one support to reduce cognitive load and create adaptable, inclusive environments for all students.
- Success requires embedding inclusion into governance and diversifying assessments. By celebrating neurodivergent strengths like creativity, universities enhance learning outcomes and prepare students for entrepreneurial careers.
Young people are talking about neurodiversity more than ever before, largely thanks to TikTok. A quick search for #ADHD on the app results in more than five million posts.
The platform is helping to make information about neurodivergence more visible and accessible than traditional medical or professional resources, affirms new research from the University of Canterbury. It gives young people a space to assert their identities and connect with others who share similar experiences.
While critics warn about the dangers of young people self-diagnosing, these videos also encourage people to seek professional diagnoses. In England, for example, ADHD medication prescriptions have nearly doubled from 127,000 to 248,000 between 2020 and 2025, which clinicians link at least partly to increased public awareness due to social media like TikTok.
As diagnoses rise and conversations become more open, higher education institutions are also rethinking how they can tailor their academic offerings to make learning easier for those who have cognitive diversity.
Introducing practical changes
For some highly practical higher education programmes, neurodivergence can offer students unique benefits.
Certain structured, fast-paced environments, such as professional kitchens, can play to the strengths of some neurodivergent students, explains Lisa Peel, Head of Learning Resources at the Swiss Hotel Management School (SHMS). This is mainly because students need to be very organised, and instructions are straightforward and clear. Mistakes are corrected instantly. “Plus, they can demonstrate creativity – a quality often reported by neurodivergent students,” she adds.
SHMS specialises in hospitality management taught at a higher education level. At the school, faculty are trained on how to effectively teach students with neurodiverse behaviours. “Every lecturer was more aware of students’ needs and able to provide additional support,” shares Peel.
Neurodiversity training to staff is offered in the form of a ‘Bite-Sized Inclusion’ series at Hungary’s Corvinus University of Budapest. This three-part workshop was created to strengthen inclusion in teaching and learning, and to inspire inclusive learning environments.
Running across two semesters, the series combined concepts with practical frameworks, backed up with reflective, case-based work. Corvinus worked to ensure this inclusion training was informed by theory but directly transferable to classroom practice.
“The key to meaningful learning is the ability to fully participate and to do that in a safe environment,” says Kata Dósa, Head of the university’s Centre for Teaching and Learning.
So far, the workshops have helped faculty to design more inclusive and pedagogically flexible classrooms. For neurodiverse students, this translates into clearer structure, and more accessible materials, as well as more varied interaction and assessment formats.
“Students are more likely to engage, persist and contribute at a high level when teaching design recognises cognitive diversity as a resource rather than a deficit,” says Dósa.
Building support into the structure
Some institutions are even embedding neurodiversity at governance level. At Switzerland’s César Ritz Colleges, it now sits formally within the institution’s Diversity and Inclusion framework alongside gender equality and harassment prevention.
“We realised diversity is much wider than cultural background – students also think and learn differently,” says Tanja Florenthal, Executive Director of Quality Assurance at the school. “It’s not handled case by case. It sits within governance, policies and monitoring like any other priority.”
One of the ways this is demonstrated in practice is assessment design. The school diversifies its assessment formats, using a combination of presentations, group projects, reflective work and case analyses, rather than relying exclusively on high-pressure written exams. These formats naturally allow students to engage in different ways, meaning all styles of learning are tested.
At Manchester Metropolitan University Business School in the UK, inclusion is also now viewed as mainstream rather than a specialist provision. “With 17.14 percent of students declaring a disability, the Faculty of Business and Law has embedded inclusion at scale,” says Dr Katharina De Vita, Faculty Director of Education at Manchester Metropolitan University Business School.
Since 2022, 3,400 undergraduates have engaged in a strengths-based development framework, supported by digital tools such as ‘Genio Notes’, which enables lecture recording, transcription and AI-generated revision quizzes.
By embedding strengths-based development within the curriculum and deploying these types of AI enabled tools that reduce the cognitive load for students, the school hopes to create structured, repeatable and flexible routes into learning.
“For neurodiverse students, innovation in pedagogy and digital design is not an add-on; it is central to equitable participation and success,” adds Dr Andrew Wilson, the school’s Department Education Lead and Senior Lecturer.
Making subtle, everyday changes
Some institutions focus less on providing formal training and implementing grand changes, and more on the practical everyday details. Support is subtly built directly into the structure of teaching and interaction at online higher education institution, the Open Institute of Technology (OPIT), by ensuring students have lots of opportunities for one-on-one time with faculty.
OPIT encourages students who are hesitant to interact in group environments or require additional support to attend professors’ regular office hours or contact their tutors, who are available six days a week, 12 hours a day. This provides a lower-pressure channel for students who need more time to process and formulate questions.
“We emphasise from the start that seeking support is normal and encouraged, and that it is part of how students navigate their learning journey, not a sign of difficulty or failure,” explains Sara Ciabbatoni, Senior Program Coordinator at OPIT.
From the start, OPIT runs sessions specifically on how to optimise the use of the online campus: setting notifications, syncing calendars, tracking deadlines and enabling accessibility features on the platform. All lectures are recorded, accompanied by a transcript and a summary, which reduces the pressure of having to capture everything in a live session. Programme coordinators help students to create a structured plan that covers when to attend live sessions or watch recordings, and how to distribute their work for upcoming assessments.
The school also promotes the use of project-based assignments, which offer more flexibility than traditional exams. Each one is open for at least a week to give students the chance to effectively manage their workload. This can help neurodiverse students to process information at their own pace and reduce the pressure of listening and taking notes at the same time.
“Support is not one-size-fits-all: students with the same diagnosis may require different forms of assistance,” says Ciabbatoni.
Docsity, created by OPIT’s Founder, Riccardo Ocleppo, provides another way for neurodiverse students to engage with learning material. Used by nearly 34 million students worldwide, the note sharing and collaborative learning platform uses AI to turn student-submitted notes and lectures into clear transcripts, summaries and interactive concept maps.
Inclusion is a core focus for the platform: through collaboration with tutors and teachers specialised in neurodiversity, the app has been designed to be accessible, with features that support students with ADHD or learning disabilities.
Proving support for entrepreneurs
When it comes to entrepreneurship, neurodiverse individuals often experience specific benefits, while also facing unique challenges.
Traits associated with ADHD, for example, can support creativity, risk-taking and action under uncertainty. Yet the same traits may hinder planning, sustained attention or execution of routine operational tasks such as coordination, administration or financial management.
“This duality means individuals may excel at venture initiation while encountering difficulties during structuring or growth stages,” explains Pablo Muñoz, Professor of Entrepreneurship at the UK’s Durham University Business School.
To help with this, Professor Muñoz and his colleagues, entrepreneurs Kat Sykes and Jason Smith, founded the business development programme Mind Your Business, which is soon to be integrated into the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore’s incubator, and Denmark’s SkyLab.
The programme began from research that revealed founders often succeed commercially while struggling personally. The team translated their research insights into business development programmes designed for founders, business advisers, incubators, universities and schools.
“Entrepreneurial performance and mental fitness are interdependent,” says Professor Muñoz.
In many cases these individuals may have experienced exclusion or reduced self-worth earlier in education or employment that shaped their confidence and access to opportunities later on.
Through structured workshops, reflective tools, and coaching frameworks, participants build awareness of how they think, work and decide. They rethink how they mobilise resources, define performance, and approach modelling and planning. This helps them align how they develop themselves with how they develop their businesses.
“Many traits associated with neurodiversity, particularly ADHD, are often seen as problematic in conventional employment settings, yet they align well with the demands of entrepreneurship,” says Professor Muñoz. He adds that entrepreneurship can provide a context where neurodiverse characteristics – such as creativity, novelty seeking, flexibility, risk tolerance and action orientation – are productively leveraged.
“Ultimately, the core challenge is not a lack of entrepreneurial potential but navigating environments, support systems, and venture lifecycle demands that do not always match diverse cognitive styles,” he explains.
Elisabeth Forget, diversity and inclusion specialist at ESSEC Business School in France says she recognises the value neurodiverse students bring, particularly when it comes to entrepreneurship. “They frequently demonstrate unique intuition and a strong capacity for innovation, thinking beyond established paths,” she says.
The school has seen a rise in the number of neurodiverse students in recent years, and so, through close coordination between the Disability Office and the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, support has been integrated into the entrepreneurial training pathway.
From this, faculty have access to neurodiversity awareness training, and the Disability and Talents Certificate, helping them better recognise different communication styles and ways of working. Students, too, benefit from specialist entrepreneurship professors while also receiving tailored support, including connections to committed companies and access to career forums.
Embracing unique perspectives
As diagnoses, and the conversations around them increase, institutions must make sure they can effectively support all students, including those with diverse learning requirements.
Institutions are doing this in many different ways, both formally and informally: offering neurodivergent-specific training for faculty, or simply by offering students more time for one-on-one interactions with faculty.
But neurodiversity is not a problem to solve, and it’s important that institutions must not treat it as one. Instead, unique ways of thinking must be celebrated. Neurodivergent students can greatly enhance a programme, offering new perspectives and approaches –and this will enhance learning for every student.