In a companion article I set out why dyslexia and mental health are so closely linked, and why so much of the distress comes not from the difficulty itself but from how it gets handled. This piece is about the hopeful part: what actually protects a young person’s wellbeing. It’s grounded in my own research and the wider evidence, and, happily, a lot of it costs very little.

There’s one idea underneath all of it. The things that protect the wellbeing of dyslexic and neurodivergent learners are, almost without exception, good practice for everyone. This isn’t really about special treatment for a handful of children. It’s about building classrooms and homes that work better for the whole group, and that happen to work best of all for the children who were struggling.

1. Adaptive teaching, not differentiation

The most important shift is a quiet one, and it lives in the gap between two words.

Traditional differentiation tends to give a child with SEND something visibly different to do: a separate worksheet, an easier task, a support adult sitting alongside them. It’s well-meant, but it can single a young person out, and as I explained in the companion piece, being singled out is itself linked to poorer wellbeing (De Neve et al., 2023; Francis et al., 2019; Knapton, 2022).

Adaptive teaching works differently. It designs the lesson from the start so that a range of needs is anticipated inside the same learning, rather than bolting separate provision on afterwards. That difference matters enormously for whether a child feels they belong. I explore it across three linked 2025 outputs: our case study in Education 3-13 (Ross, Malone and Wood, 2025), the whole-school analysis in Pastoral Care in Education (Wood, Ross and Malone, 2025), and the more practical Adaptive teaching: from paper to practice (Ross, Malone and Wood, 2025) for the Chartered College of Teaching.

2. Meaningful choice and self-regulation

A steady finding in my recent research is the quiet power of real choice. Drawing on Universal Design for Learning, when young people can make meaningful choices about how they learn and how they settle themselves, they engage better and their wellbeing improves.

In the case study at the heart of Ross, Malone and Wood (2025), staff described “regulation stations” in the classroom, and flexibility over how young people used their unstructured time. One child chose ten minutes of Lego, and then, once settled, chose to stay in for break. The head teacher’s phrase has stayed with me. It’s about “finding that thing that connects that child”. Where self-regulation is supported and the strategies are actually taught, better engagement in learning tends to follow (De Neve et al., 2023; Mullins and Panlilio, 2023).

One honest caveat from the same research: choice depends on resources. Not every classroom has room for a regulation station, and what works beautifully in one setting may not travel to another. The principle holds. The way you put it into practice has to be built for the actual room and the actual class in front of you.

3. Safe spaces

Sometimes wellbeing needs somewhere to go. In A case study: developing a safe space for vulnerable young people at school (Ross, 2019), in Support for Learning, I studied one school’s quiet room, the “Oasis Room”, for young people who found the noisy, unstructured parts of the day overwhelming.

The results said a lot. The space improved young people’s experiences of getting along with each other, it reduced behavioural incidents, and it let pastoral staff step in early and supportively, rather than reacting after something had already gone wrong. A calm, predictable place to gather yourself isn’t a luxury or a reward. For some young people it’s the thing that makes the rest of the school day possible.

4. Independence through assistive technology

One of the quietest threats to a dyslexic young person’s wellbeing is having to depend on other people: always needing an adult to read for you, always being the one who can’t. Assistive technology can shift that, and I’ve researched its impact directly.

In my study of a reading-support device, Impact of OrCam Learn on reading comprehension (Ross, 2024) in Support for Learning, students’ reading comprehension improved by a mean of 8.31 standard points, a statistically significant, medium-to-high effect. The number that stays with me, though, is a human one. Ninety-four per cent of the young people preferred reading with the device to reading without any support, and 84 per cent preferred it to being read to by a person. They valued getting on independently, alongside their classmates, without their difficulty on show. (In the spirit of the transparency I argue for in my work on research and industry collaboration, that study was funded by the device’s manufacturer, and the paper says so plainly.)

Independence and dignity are wellbeing outcomes in their own right.

5. Working with families to lower the temperature

I’ve written a good deal about how often parents experience supporting their child as a “battle”, in my chapter “It’s a Battle!” (Ross, 2021) and in my study of how parents engage with school-based support (Ross, 2019). A family locked in conflict with a school is a stressed family, and that stress becomes part of the child’s world.

Schools can take a lot of the heat out of this early, and cheaply. Meet parents at the first sign of concern. Be honest about what the school can and can’t do. Treat families as partners rather than problems to be managed. When families and young people feel included, they lean in rather than pulling away. A lot of the “cost” of dyslexia I documented in the APPG Human Cost of Dyslexia report (Ross and Hicks, 2019) is emotional, and a good relationship with school is one of the few things that reliably brings it down.

6. Don’t forget the adults

We can’t ask worn-out teachers to be a steady source of calm and consistency for anxious young people. I’ve spoken and written a lot about “wobbly teachers”, about the wellbeing of the staff who hold it all together, because looking after them isn’t a distraction from children’s wellbeing. It’s one of the conditions for it. A school that looks after its adults is in a far better position to look after its children.

The bigger picture: the choices we afford

Running underneath all of this is the question I’ve been sitting with since my 2025 Churchill Fellowship. Its focus was a little older than the children in the studies above. I looked at how neurodivergent girls and young women, aged 16 to 25, can be better supported as they move beyond compulsory school, and I spent 2026 visiting schools, colleges, universities and workplaces in Australia and the United States to see what works elsewhere. But the thread that ran through everything I found sits right at the heart of wellbeing, at any age.

The clearest finding was that a successful move into adult life can’t be measured by exam results or a university place on their own. What young people also need is self-knowledge, confidence, and the ability to speak up for themselves, and those things grow out of having real choices to make and being allowed to make them, including the occasional wrong one. In the settings where young people did best, autonomy wasn’t the same as being left to cope alone. As I put it in the report, the removal of support is not the same as the development of independence. Young people became independent through interdependence: by understanding themselves, saying what they needed, and being met by people and systems that actually did something about it.

That last part is the half we most often forget. Self-advocacy only works where the school, the college or the workplace is willing to listen and act. So widening the choices we afford young people, which is the thread running through everything above, isn’t only about what we let them choose. It’s about building settings flexible enough to say yes.

All of it, from adaptive teaching to meaningful choice, safe spaces, independence and partnership with families, comes back to that. It’s what protects wellbeing, in the classroom and long after a young person has left it. You can read the full Fellowship report, and its thirty recommendations, on the Churchill Fellowship website.

If you’d like help embedding any of this in your setting, my work with schools is built around exactly these ideas, and you’re always welcome to book a free call.

Questions people often ask

What’s the single most effective thing a school can do? Move from differentiation that singles children out to adaptive teaching that anticipates need inside the same learning. It’s a change of design, not a change of budget, and it protects a child’s sense of belonging.

Are “regulation stations” and safe spaces just for children with a diagnosis? No, and that’s rather the point. The research suggests these approaches help the whole class. Making them available to everyone takes away the stigma of being the child who “needs” the special provision.

Isn’t assistive technology expensive? Some devices cost money, but a lot of assistive technology is already built into the software schools use, like the accessibility features in Office 365 and Google Workspace. Plenty of schools also run loan schemes. It’s always worth asking.

How can parents support wellbeing at home? Help your child build a positive, accurate story about their dyslexia. Keep the relationship with school as collaborative as you can. And protect the things that are already working, including the small rituals that help your child feel capable and calm.

References and further reading

The research below is by Dr Helen Ross and is publicly accessible. Wider works cited in passing (De Neve et al., 2023; Mullins and Panlilio, 2023; Francis et al., 2019; Knapton, 2022) are fully referenced within the linked papers.

See the full list of publications.

Dr Helen Ross is a dyslexia and SEND specialist, researcher and qualified diagnostic assessor based in Trowbridge, Wiltshire. She holds a PhD from the University of Bath, is a 2025 Churchill Fellow, and is the author of Literacy Learning Journeys: Dyslexia Across the Ages, 0-18 (Speechmark/Routledge). She works with families, schools and organisations across the UK and internationally. Book a free 20-minute call.