When I received a HERDSA conference grant earlier last year, I thought I was attending an academic conference. In reality, I stepped into a moment that fundamentally reframed how I understand learning, teaching, and the human experience at the heart of higher education.

As someone who is neurodivergent and works closely in accessibility and inclusive education, the grant did more than support all my conference expenses. It gave me space to articulate something I had sensed for a long time: higher education is full of thoughtful, well-intentioned practice, yet much of it was never designed with cognitively diverse minds in the room.

This blog is both a reflection on that experience and an invitation to the sector. In an era where diversity is not the exception but the norm, it asks us to rethink what inclusive learning really means.

A Turning Point: Seeing Neurodiversity from the Outside In

At HERDSA 2025, I was surrounded by educators, researchers, and professional staff who were deeply engaged with the realities of contemporary higher education. People were grappling honestly with complexity, uncertainty, and change. What stayed with me most, however, was not a keynote or a panel. It was the experience of being seen, fully and without qualification, as a neurodivergent educator.

For years, I have worked in accessibility spaces redesigning assessments, advocating for Universal Design for Learning, and trying to make visible the barriers neurodivergent students and staff navigate every day. At HERDSA, those experiences resonated far beyond my own work. In workshops, roundtables, and corridor conversations, people leaned in when discussions turned to hidden curriculum, processing load, working memory, cognitive fatigue, and the emotional labour of navigating systems that were not designed for how many people think and learn.

What became clear was something both simple and profound; Inclusion is not about adding more content. It is about removing long-standing barriers.

What Neurodivergent Learners Reveal About Higher Education

The longer I work in this space, the clearer it becomes that neurodivergent learners are not outliers. They illuminate the design pressures that affect everyone. When students say assessment briefs are confusing, they are pointing to missing structure. When students feel overwhelmed, they are revealing cognitive overload embedded in course design. When students struggle with unspoken expectations, they are encountering the hidden curriculum. These are not individual deficits. They are systemic design issues.

Neurodiversity-informed practice does not create special accommodations. Instead, it strengthens learning environments for all students, including those who never disclose a disability or difference.

At HERDSA 2025, my team and I shared our work on the Inclusive Teaching Toolkit through Diversified, a project we co-founded at UNSW in 2021. The toolkit was developed through co-design with neurodivergent students, lived-experience staff, and academics across disciplines. We ran a pre-conference workshop and a roundtable, both of which filled beyond capacity. Educators asked for the toolkit, requested training, and expressed interest in piloting the resources within their own institutions. The response was overwhelming in the best possible way.

What I continue to reflect on, however, is the contrast between this strong external uptake and the slower, more cautious engagement within my own institution. This difference is not unique. Often, systems closest to a problem are the most constrained by inertia, risk, and competing priorities. Yet the reaction at HERDSA reaffirmed something essential. Neuro-inclusive design resonates across the sector, and educators are actively seeking practical tools that honour cognitive diversity.

Each time we walked through examples, redesigning assessment briefs and rubrics into clearer, visual, and step-based formats, the response was remarkably consistent: “Why didn’t we have this earlier?”

Towards Human-Centred Academic Practice

Across HERDSA 2025, a shared message emerged: higher education must move towards genuinely human-centred design. Whether framed through Universal Design for Learning, inclusive assessment, or trauma-informed pedagogy, the shift is clear.

Human-centred practice recognises that:

• students are cognitively diverse
• learning environments should reduce unnecessary cognitive load
• clarity is not simplification
• transparency is not hand-holding
• accessibility is not an add-on

When educators design with neurodivergent learners in mind, different questions emerge:

• Are expectations explicit or assumed?
• Is cognitive load scaffolded or compounded?
• Does this assessment measure learning, or endurance?
• How might this be experienced by someone who processes visually, lives with ADHD, or manages chronic illness?

These questions do not lower standards. They make teaching fairer, clearer, and more humane.

Where to From Here?

Returning from HERDSA, I am more committed than ever to scaling work grounded in a simple premise: cognitive diversity should shape how we design higher education.

What if neurodivergent students were not treated as exceptions, but as essential co-designers of curriculum?

What if accessibility moved beyond compliance and became a form of pedagogical craft, intentional, embedded, and sophisticated?

What if inclusive design were seen not as extra work, but as better academic practice?

HERDSA was the catalyst that made visible the sector-wide appetite for this shift. The conversations, the uptake of the Inclusive Teaching Toolkit, and the collective desire for change all reinforced a belief I have held for some time: neuro-inclusive design is not a niche project. It is the future of equitable higher education.

Call to Action

If you are redesigning a course, writing an assessment brief, or shaping institutional policy, consider starting with one question: Who isn’t this designed for, and what would change if they were?

Further Reading and Resources

Banner image adapted from: https://santamaria.wa.edu.au/educators-supporting-neurodiverse-students/