Notice differently. Ask differently. Adapt practice. Review whether it helped.
Work through a structured route across the Neurodivergent Practice Support Hub, combining lived-experience-informed learning, executive functioning, communication, reasonable adjustment, critical reflection and applied professional judgement.
Start the pathway ↓
This self-directed CPD pathway provides 3 structured hours and guides you through six connected stages of neuroinclusive practice. You will explore what you notice, what you may be assuming, what might sit underneath a person’s presentation, how to ask more useful questions, how to make meaningful adjustments and how to review whether those changes actually helped.
The pathway combines interactive activities, lived-experience-informed thinking, executive-function and communication challenges, applied scenarios and reflective practice, finishing with an integrated professional judgement activity.
6 stages · 3 structured CPD hours · Practical and interactive · Applied professional judgement
How to use it: complete the stages in order. Open each required activity, work through it, then return here for the next stage. The wider Hub remains available for additional games, flashcards, lived experience, public information and practice-support tools.
Each stage has a defined learning purpose and required activity, with the wider Neurodivergent Practice Support Hub available for optional extension and ongoing practice support.
Separate observation from interpretation and challenge the assumptions that can gather around behaviour, communication and apparent engagement.
Stay with what is actually observable before deciding what it means. Consider masking, context, hidden load, strengths and different ways of processing the world.
Experience how executive-function, sensory and processing demands can make apparently simple professional tasks much harder than they look from the outside.
Connect the learning to appointments, forms, waiting, remembering information, transitions, task initiation, switching attention and processing verbal information.
Move from identifying a possible need to finding out how this person experiences communication, sensory load, uncertainty, transitions, memory, attention and demand.
The aim is not to diagnose from behaviour. Ask what helps, what gets in the way, what the person already knows about themselves and what professionals may be missing.
Translate what you have learned into practical changes to communication, pace, environment, information, task demands and professional processes.
Use the meaningful adjustment test: What is the barrier? What does the person say would help? What can we change? Did we actually make the change? Did it improve access or participation?
Use a serious practice review lens to examine what happens when services interpret presentation without sufficiently understanding neurodivergent experience, communication or environmental demand.
Work back through the situation: Notice → Wonder → Ask → Adapt → Review. Identify where professional assumptions, service processes or missed adjustments may have changed the person’s experience or the outcome.
Bring the pathway together in one applied mental health social work scenario. Work through what is observable, what may be increasing threat, where agency can be strengthened, what professional curiosity requires and what you would actually say or do next.
Final task: make and justify an integrated professional response, then identify one change you will carry into your own practice.
The endpoint is active engagement with the pathway and an applied professional response, not simply time spent on the page.
Your feedback helps us improve the DCC-i Portal, the Neurodivergent Practice Support Hub and future CPD pathways.
When you have completed the pathway, please take a moment to complete the Portal evaluation.
Complete all six stages, finish the final applied activity and submit or record your final practice reflection.
