AI and students with learning differences

For a student who reads slowly, writes with great effort, or is working in their second language, AI can be transformative in a way it simply is not for a confident learner. It can also, used differently, remove the exact work that would have built the skill.

The distinction is the same one that governs any access arrangement: does this remove a barrier that is not what we are assessing, or does it remove the thing we are assessing? A reader for a maths paper removes a barrier. A reader for a reading comprehension paper removes the test.

Where it clearly removes a barrier

A student who reads slowly, in a subject that is not reading

A dense history source can be simplified without touching the historical thinking the lesson is about. The student still analyses, compares and argues; they are no longer failing the lesson because of decoding speed.

A student writing in a second language

Vocabulary support and checking whether a sentence says what they meant lets a student demonstrate understanding of the subject rather than their current English. In a science lesson, English is the barrier and not the assessment.

A student who cannot get started

For many students with ADHD or anxiety around writing, the blank page is the whole obstacle. A model that asks three questions about what they want to say, and reflects the answers back as a rough structure, gets past an obstacle that has nothing to do with capability.

A student who needs the same thing explained repeatedly

Some students need six explanations, and human patience is finite in a class of thirty. A tool that gives the seventh without any change in tone is genuinely valuable, and the student knows it is not sighing.

Where it removes the learning

• Summarising a text in a lesson whose purpose is learning to summarise.
• Producing the writing in a task assessing written expression, including when a student struggles with exactly that.
• Answering comprehension questions about a text the student has not read.
• Any use that means the student never attempts the difficult step, when attempting it is the point.

The hard cases are where the barrier and the assessment are the same thing — a dyslexic student in an English writing assessment. There, AI is not an access arrangement, and the right answer is the school's existing framework for support, not a chatbot.

The question that resolves most cases

What is this task assessing, and is the thing AI would do the thing being assessed?

If the answer is no, it is support. If yes, it is a substitute. The same tool, the same student, and the same paragraph can be either, depending on the lesson's purpose — which is why this cannot be settled by a blanket rule and has to be decided task by task.

Three practical cautions

Dependency is real, and so is its opposite

A student who always has the text simplified may not build reading stamina. A student who never gets past the first paragraph builds nothing at all. The answer is to reduce the support deliberately over time rather than to withhold it.

Simplification loses things

A simplified source is not the source. In history particularly, the language is often part of the evidence. Use simplification to get a student into a text, then bring them back to the original for the part that matters.

Ask the student

Students with learning differences usually know exactly which part is hard, and are rarely asked. "Which bit slows you down?" produces a better answer than any assumption about what a diagnosis implies.

A note on dignity

A student who has spent years being visibly the one with the different worksheet gains something real from a tool everyone in the room is using. That is not a small benefit and it does not show up in any assessment data.

It also argues for the tool being available to the whole class rather than assigned to particular students, with the teacher directing its use per task. Support that does not announce itself is more likely to be used.