The Summer Adjustment Gap: A Sensory Lens for Supporting Neurodivergent Staff Through the Hottest Months

By mid-July, most Further Education leadership teams have shifted their attention to enrolment, exam boards and the slow scramble to close out the academic year. What tends to get missed in that scramble is a quieter, more predictable pattern: a dip in engagement, patience and output from neurodivergent staff, arriving reliably every year the moment the mercury climbs and the school-holiday routine that anchors so many working lives falls away.

It is easy to read this as a seasonal blip, the kind of thing a fan on a desk or a “wear what’s comfortable” email can fix. It is not. Heat and routine disruption interact with sensory processing in ways that are well documented but rarely built into how FE providers think about reasonable adjustments. Treating a July performance dip as a discipline issue, or worse, as nothing at all, is a missed opportunity to lead well when it matters most.

A story that repeats every summer

A programme leader at a large college notices one of her strongest tutors, autistic and previously reliable, becoming short-tempered with students, withdrawing from the staffroom, and missing small administrative deadlines she never used to miss. Nothing has changed in the job. What has changed is the building: south-facing classrooms hitting the high twenties by midday, air handling that was never designed for this, and a summer timetable that swapped the predictable term-time rhythm for exam cover, open days and last-minute enrolment cohorts.

The manager’s instinct is kindness: she tells the tutor to take it easy, dress down, work from home if she needs to. It helps for a day or two. But without a clear framework behind the gesture, the adjustment depends entirely on that manager remembering, that week, to extend it. Ambiguity like this rarely survives a busy fortnight, and the tutor is left guessing whether the accommodation still stands.

Why heat and routine disruption hit differently

The most useful way to understand what is happening here is through a sensory processing lens: the recognition that neurodivergent brains, across the autism and ADHD spectrum, register and filter sensory input differently rather than deficiently. Temperature is one of the clearest examples. Research on thermoception, the sense that governs how the body detects and interprets heat, shows that autistic people frequently experience altered temperature discrimination, sometimes hyposensitive, sometimes hypersensitive, often both depending on context. A 2024 systematic review in Applied Psychology examining physical workplace adjustments for neurodivergent workers found that temperature was repeatedly identified as a disruptive sensory factor, capable of triggering the same stress response as noise or crowding, and noted that, despite this, the evidence base on effective environmental adjustments remains thin.

Layer summer holidays on top of that, and the picture gets more complicated. For many neurodivergent adults, a predictable routine is not a preference but a regulatory tool. When the structure of the working day shifts (different colleagues covering different rooms, informal dress codes, exam-season unpredictability), the loss of routine itself becomes a stressor, independent of the heat. The two compound each other at exactly the time of year FE providers are least resourced to notice.

Two sectors, two very different starting points

This plays out unevenly across FE. In a large general college, a hot week usually triggers some kind of institutional response: estates teams can identify which rooms are least usable and move classes accordingly, HR can point to an existing policy, and there is often an occupational health referral route if an adjustment needs to be formalised quickly. The response may still be patchy, but there is infrastructure to lean on.

In an independent training provider or apprenticeship organisation, that infrastructure is often thin or absent. Assessors and coaches working across multiple employer sites, cars and temporary spaces have far less control over their physical environment, and the line manager carries the adjustment conversation almost entirely alone, often without HR backup or a formal policy to point to. The obligation to make reasonable adjustments does not shrink because the organisation is smaller, but the practical means to meet it do.

A second, less obvious divide sits within colleges themselves: between staff on term-time-only contracts, who lose the predictable rhythm of term dates altogether over the summer, and year-round teaching and support staff who continue working through the enrolment and results season, often at a higher intensity, while colleagues are on leave. Both groups face routine disruption. Neither is well served by a single generic summer email.

The policy blind spot

UK workplace law does not help much here. The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 require a “reasonable” indoor temperature and set an approved minimum, but there is still no statutory maximum. The Health and Safety Executive confirmed in 2026 that it is reviewing its Approved Code of Practice in light of increasingly frequent heatwaves, but for this summer, providers are working from Acas guidance rather than firm law: earlier or later hours, temporary home working where roles allow, relaxed dress codes, and better access to rest and water. Sound advice, but generic, and generic advice tends to get applied generically, as a blanket gesture to all staff rather than a needs-led response to how individuals actually experience heat and disruption.

That gap matters more than it might look. The City & Guilds Foundation’s 2026 Neurodiversity Index found that only around a third of UK employers have a formal neurodiversity policy, and that more than half of disabled staff who requested an adjustment received only partial implementation, with cost cited as a barrier in nearly one in five cases. Without a policy to anchor summer adjustments in, managers are left improvising, and improvisation is exactly where ambiguity and the quiet unkindness that comes with it creep in.

What leadership teams can actually do

None of this requires reinventing FE’s approach to inclusion. It requires treating summer as a predictable, recurring pressure point rather than an inconvenience to manage each year informally.

At an individual level, that means revisiting existing adjustment plans before the heat arrives rather than after performance has already dipped, asking staff directly what their sensory and routine needs are rather than assuming a fan or a dress-code memo will do, and building in flexibility around time of day, since many neurodivergent staff concentrate best outside the hottest, busiest hours of a summer school day.

At an organisational level, it means writing summer adjustments into the same reasonable adjustments policy used the rest of the year rather than treating them as a separate, informal courtesy; giving smaller providers and independent training organisations access to shared HR or occupational health expertise so the burden does not sit entirely with individual line managers; and reviewing estates data each spring to identify which rooms and roles will be hardest hit before term ends, not after.

A culture, not a fortnight

FE providers that get this right are not the ones with the best fans or the most generous dress-down policy. They are the ones that recognise heat and routine disruption as a genuine, recurring dimension of neuroinclusive practice, worthy of the same clarity and planning given to any other reasonable adjustment. That takes sustained attention rather than a single well-meant email in the first week of a heatwave.

The tutor in that hot south-facing classroom does not need her manager to be endlessly inventive every July. She needs a system that remembers what she needs without her having to ask twice. Building that system is slower and less visible than sending a kind email in a heatwave, but it is the difference between an organisation that reacts to its neurodivergent staff and one that is genuinely built to include them, in July and every other month of the year.

By Nathan Whitbread, the Neurodivergent Coach