The survey, reported by Personnel Today on 9 November, puts manager confidence at 53%, against 46% of employees who say their line manager has the skills to help them. For employees with a long-term health condition, the gap has widened over time rather than closed: manager confidence has fallen from 70% in 2022 to 56% now, a decline W2W says has continued over four years, even as awareness of neurodiversity and health conditions at work has grown.
Dr Julie Denning, a chartered health psychologist and W2W’s managing director, said the confidence gap reflects missing expertise more than missing willingness among managers. “Leaning on health experts is fast becoming an essential, not a nice to have,” she said, pointing out that line managers already carry a heavy load of responsibilities and cannot reasonably be expected to become specialists in every condition an employee might disclose.
W2W’s figures land alongside other research pointing the same way. A survey of 495 HR, learning and development and compliance professionals by compliance training provider VinciWorks, published in April, found 35% believed managers at their organisation lacked confidence discussing reasonable adjustments for neurodivergent staff, with only 6.5% rating manager confidence as high. Training provision was patchy: 39% of the organisations surveyed had delivered neurodiversity training, but only around a fifth of those had built it into an ongoing programme rather than run it as a one-off session. VinciWorks’ head of compliance, Nick Henderson-Mayo, put the underlying problem plainly: “A single standalone session is unlikely to change how a manager behaves.”
The gap is showing up in tribunal statistics too. Analysis by law firm Irwin Mitchell of His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service data, published in May, found that neurodiversity discrimination claims have nearly doubled over five years, rising from 265 cases to 517, with a 19% jump between 2024 and 2025 alone. Autism and ADHD are the conditions most often cited. Defending a single claim costs an employer an average of £8,500, before any award or settlement is factored in.
The employee side of the story looks much the same. Leesman’s “Big Questions” research, published in October and drawn from more than 1.6 million workplace responses, found that staff with a disability, long-term condition or neurodivergent profile were less satisfied than their colleagues across every one of 56 workplace features it measures, and that a quarter of the office refurbishment and relocation projects it tracked actually made the experience worse for this group rather than better.
Taken together, the figures describe a problem that has had four years of rising attention with little corresponding improvement. Training budgets have grown, policies have multiplied, and discrimination claims have kept climbing regardless. What is shifting, if anything, is where the responsibility is being placed. W2W’s own recommendation, set out in a separate report in October, is that employers stop requiring a formal diagnosis before acting and respond instead to the day-to-day difficulty an employee describes. Whether that approach spreads beyond the organisations already trying it looks like the next real test of whether any of this moves.
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