Reasonable adaptations for adult teacher with ADHD?

[Wildroseladybird]

Anyone experienced this please?

what reasonable adaptations should the school make?

I don't think anyone has suggested a blanket "disabled people can't go into teaching".

The reasonable adjustments for a wheelchair user are quite different to someone with ADHD.
I suppose he doesn't have to declare his disability, which makes it difficult if it manifests itself in a way which makes it tricky for his colleagues to work with him.

Don't his employers have a responsibility to ensure reasonable adjustments have been made?

Agreed, I worked with another person with a particular disability and he couldn't organise himself, refused all admin work and it raised many, many complaints but also meant that I (also ND) ended up doing all his admin as well as my own and all the organisation for both our roles trying to keep the service we offered afloat because I didn't want the quality of the service to suffer. This was even after reasonable adjustments were made and oh were involved. My manager had to tell me to stop doing his work for him because it meant they couldn't adequately assess his capabilities for the role. When I stopped he couldn't fulfil his duties and he was supported to move on. Which was the right call. If someone cannot do their job with reasonable adjustments and adaptions in place then it's not the right job for them in the first place. It's not ableist if all reasonable steps have been taken to support the person to fulfil their role and all possible flexibility and support given.

When Reception's probably waiting for the teacher to provide the list in the first place and are currently dealing with three deliveries, nine Y7s whose cover teacher hasn't arrived in class and a member of SLT having broken the photocopier, not so much.

Apologies, in true ND style I went off on a side quest, met a squirrel and forgot to come back to the thread!

Access to Work can provide a support worker, virtual assistant, neurodiversity coaching to support all sorts of challenges amongst many other things.

Equity is all about making sure the person has what they need to be able to do the job, when they are perfectly qualified and capable of it but their disability or neurodivergency (everyone chooses their own labels) causes blockers and challenges to their being successful.

I am autistic, ADHD and have had various successful careers along the way. I also have massive challenges with executive functioning, memory and sensory issues. I am successful because with the right adjustments, my challenges are offset and my strengths mean I outperform others at times.

I spent years masking, adjusting myself for all the neurotypical working styles, not being met in the middle by people with bias and ableist views. Why should we all try to do everything the same as you when 1 in 6 people are ND. Just because societal norms are in the dark ages and NT people are ridiculously inflexible and uneducated about other people's way of existing?

I once had a doctor be surprised that I had a job and could do public speaking considering my diagnostics... he was meant to be supporting my child's same diagnosis... the world needs educating, people need to get out of their own brains when it comes to assumptions or stereotyping and education around inclusion, universal design and accessiblity need building into every aspect of life.

One of my children taught her IT teacher about ensuring the coding they were doing had accessibility considered, for dyslexia, as she refused to do the task without making something her brother could play too... that's what should be happening in schools as a start to making change. We talk about many other under represented communities, disability still gets ignored and intersectionality is almost never discussed!

Went off on a tangent! Yes, someone with ADHD can have bucket loads of adjustments put in place within a school environment to make sure they are supported and successful.

Access to Work puts a burden of £1000 of the cost onto the employer. Always better for the individual to explore what the employer can support directly before going to A2W.

It doesn’t sound like this person is seeking this though. More the OP doing it on his behalf? That’s never going to work.

These are excellent ideas.

What adaptations do you require to achieve the same level of competence and skill as someone without a disability? Then it has to be decided whether they can reasonably be put in place. Note the word reasonable because if you cannot do the job you have been hired to do they won't hire an additional person to pick up the shortfall but simple things such as software adaptations, not having to do certain extra curricular or extra induction time would be normal, less work load is not.

Brilliant post. Matches my experience too.

Formal complaints sound serious and people don’t do that lightly. If two people have actually done this, there maybe others who have thought about this.

I think this needs a two prong attack. You need to take the complaints seriously and respond accordingly. Just because you have a disability, it doesn’t absolve you from behaving properly.

The second prong is to make the person aware of how he is behaving and it comes across, and to put in appropriate measures to prevent this happening again such as training, awareness , etc. Also, other members of staff may need training to be more aware of adhd in adults.

who has got the time in their working day to fiddle faddle around with all this crap? And if there was a tiny spare cupboard anywhere we would be fighting over it tooth and nail. This is utterly unrealistic. One person does not get to make intolerable demands on everyone else in the work place

Works well with us. But we don't have anybody being a dickhead over 'fiddle faddling with crap' or fighting with others to make sure their pointy elbows maintain a further advantage over a Neurodiverse member of staff on the grounds of their Protected Characteristic. So I guess our SLT and leadership on the whole is just significantly better than yours.

Although, if you don't have time for ensuring people with Protected Characteristics aren't discriminated against, perhaps you have time to approve the settlement payments? Or aren't you high enough to know how much they cost, along with the work required to get them agreed and thus avoid costly and embarrassing discrimination cases?

Companies and schools that do not have time in their working day to fiddlefaddle around with crap

have to pay large settlements at tribunal for disability discrimination.

At which point they usually change their mind and decide that they do have the time to comply with the law.

Publicly funded schools (and universities) are under incredible time and money pressures at the moment. While it’s nice to contemplate all the sensible rational reasonable things mentioned, the reality is - in my experience anyway - that the fit, the able, those without children or caring responsibilities, have to pick up the extra work and cover up the gaps.

FYI

https://www.gov.uk/rights-disabled-person/employment

Your colleague should contact Access to work. They will be allocated a case worker that will help make an assessment of the support that is needed. The AW government grant covers 80% of the cost.

www.gov.uk/access-to-work

It’s not ableist at all. You need to be able to do your job- if you can’t it’s your employer can dismiss you. If you need reasonable adjustments to do your job, they need to be reasonable in the circumstances given the resources of your employer and the other staff

The law does not require anything more than adjustments that are reasonable.

Frequent breaks - impossible to guarantee in schools, even with timetabling best efforts you're looking at an hour at a time between possible breaks, never mind double lessons, break duties etc
Plans for being overwhelmed/other colleagues able to cover for you - again impossible to guarantee that a colleague will be free and available (and not have their own class to cover) without notice

Reasonable adjustments are just that - REASONABLE. It would not be reasonable to expect to walk out of a classroom and leave a class of kids unsupervised with no cover.

As another poster has written, reasonable adjustments are just that - they have to work with the business. A wheelchair user cannot expect a lift to be installed to reach upper floors but they could expect to work on the ground floor. A head-teacher's utmost responsibility is for the safeguarding of the children. Any adjustments need to work around that.

Can you give any examples - without being too outing of course - of the type of thing he might say or has said? I think if you elaborate on what exactly the issues, this might help you get more relevant advice being posted rather than more general discussions regarding reasonable adjustments.

I mean he is not shouting or raising his voice or being angry and yet two people have made formal complaints, so it’s hard to imagine what he’s doing “wrong”.

I’m ND and used to work in education - no one has ever made a formal complaint about me.

This is such helpful, usable guidance. Thank you so much. You clearly understand neurodiversity. It is very hard to know what to ask for when you don't know what's available. This, and my concern that I may increase someone else's workload, has prevented me from sharing my diagnosis and asking for a meeting wrt adaptations the 12 years I have been in this school.

Thanks again.

Ps anyone else finding symptoms worsened post menopause?

Interesting thread although I also wonder if the teacher in question is too identifiable.

As a newly qualified teacher, many years ago, I was assigned to work directly with a colleague who described herself as having ADHD. It was very difficult as she found it very challenging to sit down and focus for even short periods, would rarely complete written work and, during our weekly year group planning meetings, was prone to darting off around the school in pursuit of an idea, person or resource. So I just had to manage the planning as well as I could. However, she was creative and excellent with the children. Eventually she moved into alternative provision which I think suited her style far better than mainstream.

Some of the adjustments on this thread might have helped her, but I needed support too as a brand new teacher. There was no one else in the same year group. Lord knows what the school had been thinking to put us together…

I completely agree with Octavia that teachers with a disability should be accommodated, but schools are a workplace with unique challenges.

Bizarre that you leap to reasonable adjustments for disability somehow equating with people not doing their job or getting colleagues to pick up slack.

I have ADHD. I do my job. Adjustments I have are being able to work on certain tasks in the evening instead of morning, using certain applications to manage my diary, not having to lend others my laptop, being given fixed timescales for tasks instead if "whenever you like", having meetings late morning onwards where that doesnt have any impact on others/processes.

I hope you don't have any managerial responsibilities, there are neurodiverse people in every workplace.

Some of your adjustments would be fine for a teacher - own laptop, digital diary, fixed deadlines for tasks, some tasks completed at home.
However, the main task of a teacher, standing in front of 30 students and teaching, means that you can’t just have meetings when it suits you, can’t walk out of class when you feel you need to, can’t be unprepared for the teaching day in a timely manner. It’s complicated!

Good grief this is the most ableist thing I've read in a long time. Go live with Trump.

OP you need to work with the school as an individual as one person's RAs will be different to another's.

Are they not willing? As that's illegal.