Neuro-inclusion Article Two: What the NSS Is and Why It Exists

After my ADHD diagnosis, the research, and that conversation with a former employer, I noted in my last article that I’d launched something that I believe can drive real change in how we support and value neurodivergent people, and push us towards a more neuro-inclusive society. This is it: the Neurodiversity-Supportive Standard, the NSS, launched at the 5th Paris Conference on Education in June this year.

Somewhere between 15 and 20% of the world’s population is estimated to be neurodivergent: people who think, learn and process the world differently. Hold that against the skills gaps that are referenced so often, and the waste becomes obvious: a fifth of the population whose talents are routinely overlooked, misread, or pushed to the side.

Many neurodivergent people leave education with low self-esteem, low aspirations, and real difficulty finding and keeping work. I know part of that story from the inside, and I told you some of it last time. None of this is inevitable, it’s what happens when we don’t build for it.

What the NSS actually is

The NSS is a principles-based standard that recognises organisations for neuro-inclusive practice. It sets out what it means for an education or work setting to be neuro-inclusive: to support and appreciate neurodivergent people without ‘othering’ them. That last part matters more than it might first appear. A great deal of what passes for inclusion still treats neurodivergent people as a ‘they’, a group to be accommodated from the outside and managed from the outside through paperwork and exceptions. Made to feel like outsiders, many choose not to tell their employer at all. The NSS asks settings to make a different move altogether: from ‘they’ to ‘us’.

Whether a primary school, a training provider, a university department, a construction firm, or a government agency, the NSS is designed to apply to any setting, any size, any industry, or any country. The standard doesn’t care what you do, it cares how you do it for the fifth of people whose minds work differently.

Where it came from

The standard didn’t arrive from nowhere, and it isn’t a rehashed version of someone else’s framework. It grew out of Appreciating and Supporting Neurodiversity, the research I told you about in the first article of this series. That research was published in January 2025, and since then I have undertaken more research to develop and refine the NSS. Across the various pieces of research and other work that I’ve done in this space, one pattern kept appearing: most settings want to do right by neurodivergent people, but very few have a clear way to know how well they’re doing, or what to do next. Support for neurodivergent people gets talked about far more than it gets measured, and neuro-inclusion is rarely mentioned at all.

Neuro-inclusion is the right frame for closing that gap, and I chose it deliberately. Single-condition schemes have their place, but they only ever reach the people who fit one label. Neurodiversity is a broad umbrella term, and building for it helps far more people at once. It’s also designed to be specific enough to catch what generic disability frameworks overlook, including sensory processing, communication differences, and executive function. These are the places where neurodivergent people most often collide with systems that were never designed with them in mind, and they’re exactly the places general schemes tend to skate over.

Seven principles, four levels

The NSS rests on seven principles: Visible Commitment; Informed Community; Safe Disclosure and Identity; Inclusive Design; Fair Access and Opportunity; Responsive Adjustment; and Purposeful Improvement. Read them in sequence and they describe an arc: from leadership that credibly champions neuro-inclusion, through a community that understands it and systems designed for it, to an organisation that keeps learning and getting better over time (subsequent articles in this series will be going in-depth exploring each principle).

What the principles are not is just a checklist. The standard says what a neuro-inclusive setting looks like and lets each setting show how it brings that to life. That was a deliberate design choice to ensure that the NSS can work for a two-teacher rural school in Chile as well as a multinational employer based in London.

As well as the seven principles, the achievement of the NSS comes via four levels of recognition.

A setting can see honestly where it stands today and what it would take to go further:

• Aware marks the beginning of the work and is for a setting that recognises the value of neuro-inclusion and is beginning to act.
• Active recognises that resourced action is underway across the principles, though it isn’t yet the default way of working.
• Embedded means that neuro-inclusion is everyday practice, built into systems rather than resting on one passionate person.
• Exemplary recognises settings that are truly neuro-inclusive and are an example to others.

Why independence matters

The NSS is not a self-declared digital badge. The decision to award a setting a level of the NSS comes from an external assessor. Self-assessment schemes reward the settings most confident about themselves, which is not the same as the settings doing the best work.

George Angus Consulting (GAC) has designed the standard, developed from our own research, and independently assesses practice against it. An important point to note here: GAC doesn’t deliver training, there’s no course to sell. Settings can become neuro-inclusive however they choose, so there’s no conflict in the assessing. When we say a setting has reached a level, that judgement isn’t propped up by a commercial relationship on the side. It was built that way on purpose, because after over a decade in quality assurance, I know what happens when the assessor and the vendor are the same organisation.

What comes next

In the last article I described how, long before my diagnosis, I’d built my own scaffolding to survive: the private systems for wrangling distraction that masking demands. Plenty of neurodivergent people are doing exactly that right now, in classrooms and workplaces near you, quietly and at a cost. The NSS exists so the scaffolding gets built into the setting, rather than by the person.

For a neurodivergent learner or worker, a setting carrying the NSS is a clear signal that it will understand and support them; for the setting, it’s a way to know how it’s doing, show it, and keep improving.

In the next article I want to show what’s at stake when we don’t build for neurodiverse minds. I’ll be focusing on the number of young people not in education, employment or training (NEETs) in the UK, which has just passed one million for the first time in over a decade, and where the health and neurodevelopmental threads running through that number are becoming impossible to ignore.

By Stuart Martin, the Founder of George Angus Consulting and of the Neurodiversity-Supportive Standard