“If they need that much support, are they really working independently?”

The questions managers ask me about neurodiversity – Part 9

This question comes up in workplaces, but I hear versions of it particularly often in education, apprenticeships, professional training and jobs where someone is expected to demonstrate that they can work independently.

If somebody needs written instructions, regular check-ins, a mentor, assistive technology, additional processing time or someone alongside them in an important meeting, at what point do we have to ask whether they are actually independent?

It is a fair question. There are jobs where people genuinely need to make decisions for themselves, take professional responsibility and perform tasks without somebody else doing the thinking or the work for them. A teacher needs to be able to teach. A manager needs to manage. A paramedic needs to make professional decisions. An apprentice eventually needs to demonstrate the competence they are being assessed against.

But I think we have created a problem by sometimes treating independence and support as opposites.

They aren’t.

What do we actually mean by independent?

This is the first question I would ask whenever somebody tells me a person needs to demonstrate independence: what specifically do they need to be able to do independently?

That question can be surprisingly difficult to answer.

Sometimes “independence” has quietly come to mean doing everything in the same way as everybody else, without asking questions, without prompts, without tools and without anybody helping you organise or process information. But is that really the competence we are trying to measure?

Most of us use support to do our jobs. We use calendars so we don’t have to remember every appointment. We set reminders. We use templates, checklists, project-management systems, spellcheckers and increasingly AI. We ask colleagues for a second opinion. We take notes into important meetings and prepare before presentations. Senior leaders have executive assistants, organisations employ project managers to create structure, and professionals seek supervision or advice when they need it.

We don’t usually look at those people and conclude that they are incapable of independent work.

The question is not simply “Did they use support?” It is “What did the support actually do?”

Support can enable independence rather than replace it

Imagine two people are asked to produce a report.

The first person has someone else analyse the information, decide what matters, structure the argument and write most of the report for them. The second person uses assistive technology to convert speech to text because writing is significantly slower for them, then independently decides what to include, develops the analysis and takes responsibility for the finished work.

Both have received support, but those situations are fundamentally different.

Or imagine a neurodivergent employee who struggles to retain several verbal instructions. Their manager follows an important conversation with a written list of actions. The employee then prioritises the work, completes the tasks, solves the problems that arise and takes responsibility for the outcome.

Have they failed to work independently because the instructions were written down?

I would argue that the written information may be precisely what enables them to work independently.

This distinction matters enormously when we are thinking about reasonable adjustments. If we remove a support because we believe somebody should be becoming “more independent”, we may actually make it harder for them to demonstrate the competence we are trying to assess.

I see this particularly in professional training

I have been thinking about this a lot recently because of work I’ve been doing around teacher training.

A trainee teacher may be expected to demonstrate increasing independence as they progress through their placement, and that makes complete sense. By the end of their training, we need to know that they can plan lessons, teach, manage behaviour, assess learning, communicate with colleagues, respond appropriately when things change and take responsibility for their professional practice.

But what happens if that trainee is autistic and needs very explicit expectations? What if they use a visual timetable, a checklist or a structured lesson-planning template? What if they need feedback to be specific rather than implied? What if they need time to process information before responding? What if they sometimes check their understanding with a mentor?

Do those things mean they aren’t demonstrating independence?

Not necessarily.

If somebody else is planning their lessons, making their classroom decisions, telling them exactly what to do throughout the school day or repeatedly stepping in to perform parts of the role for them, then we may genuinely have a question about whether the trainee is independently demonstrating the required competence.

But a checklist isn’t teaching the lesson. Written instructions aren’t managing the class. Processing time isn’t making a professional decision on somebody’s behalf.

We need to separate support that enables somebody to demonstrate competence from support that substitutes for the competence itself.

Sometimes even being supported in a meeting gets misunderstood

This is another situation where I think our assumptions about independence can become unhelpful.

A neurodivergent employee, apprentice or trainee might ask to bring somebody to an important review meeting because they find it difficult to process information quickly, become overwhelmed in high-pressure conversations or struggle to remember what has been agreed.

That can sometimes be interpreted as evidence that they cannot advocate for themselves or function independently.

But again, we need to ask what the support person is actually doing.

There is a significant difference between someone attending a meeting and answering every question for the person, making decisions on their behalf and effectively conducting the meeting for them, and somebody who is there to support processing, help clarify an ambiguous question or make sure actions have been understood correctly.

The person can still speak for themselves, answer questions about their work, reflect on their own performance and make their own decisions.

The support is helping them access the conversation. It isn’t replacing their participation in it.

If I were supporting somebody in that situation, I would want that distinction to be very clear: “I’m here to support them to participate fully in the meeting. I’m not here to answer questions on their behalf or make professional decisions for them. They will speak for themselves about their practice and progress, and I may help with processing, clarification or making sure we’ve understood what has been discussed.”

That isn’t a workaround for incompetence. It is a way of making the process accessible.

The workplace can create dependence too

There is another side to this which I think managers and assessors need to consider. Sometimes the way we provide support accidentally creates more dependence than is necessary.

If a manager responds to every difficulty by stepping in and doing the task, the employee never gets the opportunity to develop their own strategies. If a mentor constantly tells somebody exactly what to do rather than helping them understand the decision-making framework, the person may become reliant on the mentor. If we solve every problem for someone because it is quicker, we shouldn’t then be surprised when they don’t develop confidence in solving those problems themselves.

Good support should ask: what can we put in place that enables this person to retain as much ownership as possible?

That might mean replacing repeated verbal prompting with a checklist. Instead of telling somebody which task to do next throughout the day, perhaps we create a clear system for identifying priorities. Rather than answering a judgement call for them every time, perhaps we make the decision boundaries explicit so they know which decisions they own and which should be escalated.

The aim isn’t to withdraw support until somebody struggles. It is to design support that increases their ability to act without somebody constantly stepping in.

And sometimes the support really is doing too much

I don’t want to pretend that every form of support automatically enables independence. Sometimes we do need to ask whether another person is effectively performing part of the role.

If an employee cannot complete an essential task unless somebody else makes the decisions, takes responsibility or repeatedly performs significant parts of that task for them, that is different from an adjustment that changes how information is provided or enables the employee to organise and execute the work themselves.

This is where vague descriptions of support can be unhelpful. Saying somebody needs “a lot of support” doesn’t tell us very much. What does the support person actually do? What does the employee still do? Who makes the decisions? Who gives the instructions? Who is responsible for the outcome?

Once we describe the support properly, the distinction often becomes much clearer.

There may still be difficult situations where, even with reasonable adjustments and appropriate support, somebody cannot independently perform an essential requirement of a role. We need to be able to have that conversation too. Inclusion doesn’t mean pretending that professional competence or essential job requirements don’t matter.

But we should be very sure that we are assessing the actual competence, rather than somebody’s ability to demonstrate it without tools or support.

This matters for assessment

If I were working with an assessor who was concerned that a neurodivergent trainee needed too much support, I would ask two questions.

When you say they need to demonstrate independence, what specifically must they be able to do independently?

And then:

What support would prevent you from assessing that competence, and what support would simply enable them to demonstrate it?

Those questions move us away from a vague feeling that somebody “shouldn’t need this much help” and towards something we can actually assess.

If the competence being tested is the ability to make a professional decision, somebody else cannot make that decision for them. If the competence is the ability to teach a class, somebody else cannot teach it for them. If the competence is producing an accurate report, somebody else cannot produce the analysis and present it as theirs.

But none of those things automatically tell us that the person cannot use assistive technology, written information, a checklist, processing time, structured feedback or another reasonable adjustment while demonstrating that competence.

We need to know what we are measuring.

Independence isn’t the absence of support

I think this is the idea I want managers, trainers and assessors to take away.

We are surrounded by support at work. Some of it is so normalised that we don’t even recognise it as support. The fact that somebody needs a different kind of support, or needs theirs to be more explicit, doesn’t automatically make them less capable.

What matters is whether the person retains ownership of their work. Are they doing the task? Are they applying the knowledge and skills? Are they making the decisions they are required to make? Do they understand the consequences of those decisions? Are they responsible for the outcome?

If the answer to those questions is yes, the presence of support doesn’t necessarily undermine independence. In some cases, it is the very thing that makes independence possible.

So when somebody asks me, “If they need that much support, are they really working independently?”, I don’t think the amount of support is the first thing we should measure. I want to understand what that support is actually doing.

Because independence isn’t the absence of support. It is retaining ownership, responsibility and decision-making while using the support you need to do the job.

Want to get better at supporting neurodivergent employees?

Knowing where support ends and independence begins isn’t always straightforward. Inclusive Change helps managers and organisations understand workplace barriers, reasonable adjustments and how to provide support that enables people to perform at their best.

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This is the ninth article in my series, The questions managers ask me about neurodiversity, where I’m exploring some of the difficult questions I hear in real workplaces, training rooms and professional development. These aren’t questions I want people to be frightened to ask. They’re questions I think we need to get much better at answering.