Conversations in Inclusion
When Inclusive Education Still Overwhelms Neurodivergent Students
Inclusive practice can remove barriers. But when flexibility, information and choice multiply without enough structure, they can create new ones.
By Madhav Kad, Director, Pathways International Limited
Inclusion is not the same as simplicity
Higher education has made important progress towards more inclusive teaching and assessment. But inclusion can create a paradox. Giving students more flexibility, more resources and more ways to demonstrate their learning can remove barriers. Yet without enough structure, those same choices can also create another kind of barrier: cognitive overload.
That question stayed with me after a recent conversation about neurodiversity, assessment and student support. For a student already trying to manage competing demands on attention, executive function or information processing, the problem may not be a lack of information. It may be that there is simply too much of it.
A module handbook, multiple online systems, lecture materials, emails, assessment guidance, reading lists, recorded sessions, support plans, deadlines and notifications can all contain useful information. Everything may technically be available. That does not necessarily make everything accessible.
When flexibility becomes ambiguity
There is a strong case for authentic and flexible assessment. Students should not always be forced into narrow ways of demonstrating what they know. But there is another side to this conversation: an assessment designed to encourage independence may also contain ambiguity. A task intended to give students freedom can leave some wondering where to begin, what matters most, or what "good" actually looks like.
Emerging research involving neurodivergent university students has found discomfort with assignments that lack structure or contain ambiguous expectations.[1] That does not mean universities should retreat from authentic assessment. Instead, it raises a more precise question: how do we provide freedom without removing the scaffolding some students need to use that freedom successfully?
The answer may lie in clearer expectations, better signposting, manageable information architecture and support that helps students turn a complex task into a sequence of achievable decisions. Flexibility and structure do not have to be opposites. Done well, structure can be what makes flexibility genuinely usable.
Accessibility is also about finding what matters
We often think about accessibility in terms of whether information has been provided in an accessible format. That matters enormously, but there is another layer: whether a student can find, prioritise and act on the information they need at the moment they need it.
The Office for Students describes an institutional approach aimed at making learning accessible to all while reducing the need for individual adjustments.[2] Yet its analysis of the 2025 National Student Survey found that disabled students continued to report a poorer experience than students who did not report a disability in areas including organisation and management and student voice.[3] For organisation and management, the positivity measure was 72.6% among students reporting a disability, compared with 80.1% among those reporting no disability.[3]
That gap deserves attention because accessibility cannot be considered only at the point where teaching material is produced. We also need to think about the journey surrounding it. Where does the student go next? Which document matters? Who should they contact? What is urgent, and what can wait? What does an assessment actually require?
For some students, answering those questions may consume substantial energy before the academic work has even begun.
We need better evidence, not just better stories
Student experiences are powerful. They can reveal where systems are creating difficulties in ways that institutional data may not immediately capture. But individual stories alone cannot tell us the scale or distribution of a problem.
One of the most important challenges raised in the conversation that prompted this article was the need to understand the demographics, frequency and severity behind the experiences students describe. That is something we are taking seriously at Pathways.
If students repeatedly describe information overload, unclear expectations or difficulty navigating support, we should be asking:
- How frequently does this happen?
- Which students experience it most?
- At what point in the student journey does it occur?
- How severely does it affect learning and participation?
- Do experiences differ between home and international students?
- Does English-language proficiency interact with the accessibility of information?
- Which interventions actually make a measurable difference?
This distinction matters. A compelling story can reveal a problem; good evidence can help us understand whether that problem is systemic and what might actually improve it.
Current sector data reinforces the importance of looking more closely. The Office for Students reports that disabled students comprise around a fifth of the undergraduate population, while continuing to experience differences in outcomes and experience.[4] Advance HE's latest equality dashboards similarly provide data across disability and other student characteristics, including intersections between them.[5]
The next step is to connect those sector-level patterns with the detailed experiences students describe. That means listening carefully, but also measuring carefully.
Human support still matters
As technology becomes more capable, there is a temptation to treat every information problem as a software problem. We should resist that.
Technology can organise information, summarise material, help a student retrieve something they have forgotten and reduce unnecessary friction. But support is also relational. A good support worker can understand context, recognise when a student is struggling, adapt how something is explained and build trust over time. Those qualities should not be designed out of disability support in the pursuit of efficiency.
At Pathways, our starting point is therefore the individual student. Before allocating support, we seek to understand the student's needs and then match them with an appropriately qualified support worker. The important question is not simply, "What support category does this student belong to?" It is, "What does this particular student need in order to participate, navigate university and progress?"
Those are very different questions.
Technology should sit beside the relationship
This principle is also shaping our thinking about BridgeAI. Its purpose is not to replace human support, but to explore what could sit between support sessions: helping students navigate their own notes and materials, making information easier to retrieve and giving them somewhere to begin when a relatively simple question arises.
The distinction matters. If technology can remove repetitive friction, the human relationship can concentrate on the things humans are particularly good at: judgement, empathy, context, encouragement and understanding.
AI should not become another complicated system students are expected to navigate. If it has a meaningful place in inclusive education, it should make the environment quieter, not louder.
Designing for the experience, not the checklist
Perhaps the most useful shift is a simple one. Instead of asking whether information has been provided, we should ask whether students can use it. Instead of asking whether an assessment offers flexibility, we should ask whether students understand how to navigate that flexibility. Instead of asking whether support technically exists, we should ask how easily a student can reach it when they need it.
And instead of assuming we already know the answers, we should collect better evidence.
Inclusive education should not mean giving every student exactly the same path. Nor should it mean endlessly adding more options, documents and systems. It should mean designing an environment in which different students have a genuine opportunity to find their way through.
At Pathways, we want to keep investigating what that looks like with students, support workers, academics and universities themselves. Because sometimes the next step towards inclusion is not adding more.
Sometimes it is making what already exists easier to navigate.