All Kinds of Minds™ in Education
All Kinds of Minds™ in Education helps schools, colleges, trusts and education partners reduce hidden friction, widen access to learning and create environments where every learner can contribute, grow and flourish.
Education was never designed for one kind of mind. Yet most systems still operate as if it were.
We help education settings read learners more accurately, so more brilliance can be seen, supported and built on.
Our work spans primary, secondary, further education and vocational settings. A significant part of what we do sits in FE and construction education specifically, where neurodivergent learners are heavily represented and where the gap between practical capability and recorded attainment is at its most visible.
We are currently working with Leeds College of Building as a founding UDL implementation partner, bringing behaviour-change workshops, the Friction Scan diagnostic and the All Kinds of Minds™ in Construction programme into the heart of vocational education. This is what the shift from awareness to redesign looks like in practice.
BOOK A CALLWhere we are working
Our education work is active and growing. We are not offering generic CPD. We are working with institutions ready to move from awareness into embedded, evidenced practice change.
Our current education work includes:
Leeds College of Building — Founding UDL Partnership
A whole-institution UDL programme rolling out across all 144 tutors and assessors from September 2026, preceded by a Friction Scan diagnostic in July. LCB is the founding institutional partner in a model designed to be evidenced, repeatable and scalable across the FE and vocational sector.
All Kinds of Minds™ in Construction
The external-facing programme connecting apprentices and their employer managers around a shared language for cognitive strengths. Launching September 2026 in partnership with LCB and Constructive Futures.
Education pilots
We work with a small number of schools, trusts and FE settings at any one time to keep the work grounded, practical and properly supported. If you are interested in bringing this into your setting, the right starting point is a conversation, book a call below.
The ROI is immediate: fewer behavioural incidents, more confident staff, better outcomes for all learners — not just those flagged as SEND — and an Ofsted-evidenceable improvement process that is diagnostic-led, not compliance-driven.
Why so much brilliance is still being missed in education
Some children move through 12 years of education hearing more about what they cannot do than what they can. Neurodiverse children receive around 20,000 more negative comments than their neurotypical peers, before they're 10 years old.
Not because they lack intelligence or potential. They have both.
But because the systems around them are often built to recognise only a narrow band of performance.
When that happens, children are misread.
- Access difficulty gets misread for low ability.
- Distress gets misread for defiance.
- Inconsistency gets misread for lack of effort.
- Silence gets misread for disengagement.
- Difference gets misread for deficit.
That is not a small misunderstanding.
It shapes identity, confidence, attainment, belonging and the future paths young people believe are open to them.
What educators are telling us
Many educators do not need convincing that inclusion matters.
They need the confidence, clarity and practical tools to deliver it well in real classrooms, under real pressure.
Again and again, we hear a similar pattern.
Staff care deeply. They are trying. They are noticing difference. But many do not feel fully equipped to interpret what they are seeing or respond with confidence in the moment.
They are telling us they need more than awareness.
They need:
- clearer understanding of how neurodivergence can present in real learners, including masking, overwhelm and shutdown
- practical classroom strategies they can use straight away
- more confidence around behaviour, distress and regulation
- support to adapt teaching, communication and assessment without lowering standards
- leadership and whole-setting alignment so inclusion does not rest on individual effort alone
This is not a gap in care.
It is a gap in translation.
Too often, educators are expected to carry the responsibility of inclusion without enough shared language, training or system design to make it feel clear, consistent and doable. We help with this.
That is why our work focuses not only on learner need, but on educator confidence, practical application and the wider conditions that help inclusion hold.
If you'd like to explore your current setting, take the quiz below, apx 3 mins.
Why this matters
This is not only an inclusion issue. It is a future issue.
When schools over-reward one narrow kind of success, we don't only fail some children.
We narrow the human breadth of brilliance available to society.
We lose makers, builders, growers, carers, practical thinkers, pattern spotters, designers, innovators and deep-feeling minds whose strengths may not always arrive in the most easily measured form.
We lose children who might have become extraordinary adults if someone had recognised their diverse strengths properly and early enough.
And then we call the damage 'standards'.
A system that can only recognise one kind of success is not rigorous. It is limited.
Our perspective
We start from a different question
We don't start with: 'What is wrong with this learner?'
We start with: 'What is the environment doing that is making learning, participation and recognition harder than they need to be?'
That shift changes everything.
Because the issue is often not absence of ability.
It is blocked access.
And access difficulty is not low ability.
How we typically work with education settings
Every setting is different. But the work tends to follow a natural sequence — and knowing where you are in that sequence helps us shape the right starting point together.
Start with a conversation
Before anything else, we want to understand what your setting is noticing. Where is the friction showing up? What are staff telling you? What are learners showing you that the data isn't capturing? A 20-minute call is enough to find the right entry point.
Find out where the friction actually is — the Friction Scan
For settings ready to move quickly, the Friction Scan is the most powerful starting point. A diagnostic across People, Process and Place that tells you precisely where your environment, systems and communication design are creating barriers — before a single intervention is designed. This is where we stop guessing and start building on evidence.
Build shared understanding — foundations and awareness
For settings that need to bring staff with them first, we start with a neurodiversity foundations session. Building shared language, shifting from deficit framing to design framing, and giving educators the confidence to see what they are already seeing more accurately.
Deepen practice — understanding and application
UDL workshops, behaviour and regulation sessions, inclusive teaching design. This is where understanding becomes practical skill — and where educators stop compensating inside broken conditions and start redesigning them.
Embed and sustain — transformation
Leadership alignment, whole-setting inclusion strategy, champion development, ongoing community access. This is inclusion that holds because it is built into the system, not dependent on individual effort.
Most settings begin with a conversation or the Friction Scan. From there, the pathway shapes itself around your priorities, pressures and capacity.
Who we work with
Parents and families
We bring language, insight and advocacy to experiences many families know intimately but are often left to explain alone.
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What makes us different
This is not generic awareness training.
And it's not another way of asking already overstretched staff to compensate harder inside the same broken conditions.
Our work is different because it:
- Names what is already there
- Explains why it gets blocked
- Shows how to unlock it
It combines lived experience, inclusion strategy, practical systems thinking and a strengths-informed lens that helps settings move beyond labels into better design.
We do not ask young people to become smaller to fit the room.
We help the room become more capable of holding different minds well.
Why this matters now
Education settings are under pressure to improve outcomes, strengthen attendance, support wellbeing, manage transitions, reduce exclusions, retain staff and build trust with families.
But those outcomes are harder to achieve when children are being misread at the level of everyday interpretation.
The cost of misreading is not abstract.
It shows up in behaviour, disengagement, anxiety, masking, attendance, fractured relationships, avoidable escalation and lost confidence.
The opportunity is not to add more strain.
It is to create better fit.
We believe the future needs more kinds of minds, not fewer
Learning environments that work for diverse minds do not just support inclusion. They improve engagement, behaviour, wellbeing and outcomes for everyone.
When educators are given the right understanding, language and tools, inclusion becomes more confident, more consistent and more sustainable.
Ready to explore what this could look like for your setting?
Bring All Kinds of Minds™ in Education into your setting
Whether you are looking for a keynote, workshop, learner session, transition support or a deeper diagnostic conversation, we would love to hear what your setting is noticing and where the work feels stuck.
Book an exploratory conversation to chat about anything we've shared that interests you.
BOOK A CALL
