I am a lecturer in Nursing and have frequently supported students with additional needs both in their academic work and their clinical placements. In my experience over the years, I have seen students struggle to feel safe to disclose difficulties to clinical placements because they feel they will be judged as less able than other students and University support plans have a tendency to focus on support to meet academic needs without considering that clinical placements make up 50% of the pre-registration nursing courses due to professional body requirements. It is usually left to Personal tutors to work with clinical placements to agree reasonable adjustments for the students, but they can only do so if the student is willing to disclose that they have a difficulty and often are wary that they don’t understand enough about additional needs to suggest appropriate adjustments. To try to address the fear of disclosure for students and support the staff working with clinical placements to agree reasonable adjustments I developed a Community of Practice for Neurodivergence. This was a co-productive safe place which was open to students, administrative staff, and academic staff to discuss their own experiences and coping strategies with the aim of celebrating our success and identifying where improvements could be made. The participants did not need to have a diagnosis of neurodiversity themselves; it was open to anyone who wanted to be involved and learn more about supporting people with hidden additional needs.

The students attending reported that this made them feel more comfortable asking for support and it improved their confidence to see lecturers who were qualified nurses with a neurodivergent diagnosis. One aspect which I would like to explore further, was the fact that up until this community of practice, many of my neurodivergent colleagues had kept this aspect of themselves hidden because they thought students expected them to be perfect and an expert in their field. When we discussed the need to change the stigma around seeking support for hidden additional needs and the positive outcomes of being a role model to students to support inclusivity, two of the members of the academic team started being more transparent generally to students about having their own diagnosis and we saw an increase in students feeling supported with additional needs in module feedback as a result. One of these colleagues has since gone on to win a Student Union award for her commitment to EDI (Equality, diversity and inclusion) which was based on her authenticity sharing her own information with students.

I would like to present the development process of this project and use the question session of the presentation as a scoping exercise to see whether more research is needed about whether academic staff feel safe to share their own additional needs and whether this assists students to feel supported to seek help or has a detrimental impact on their view of that academic person.

Keywords: Hidden additional needs, neurodiversity, wellbeing.