This paper approaches the topic of diversity in higher education (HE) through neurodiversity in relation to the HE workforce. Perhaps understandably, the focus for those researching diversity in HE has been upon on students and pedagogies in the sector. However, people leaving a university programme to move into employment do not change overnight with implications for leadership and management of the higher education workforce (O’Dwyer & Thorpe, 2013; Wissell et al., 2022) with particular issues for teachers of vocational education who often occupy a liminal place (Thorpe & Burns, 2016). The term neurodiversity has been used to signal that different ways of thinking, learning, and behaving are better understood as examples of diversity rather than as deficits in contrast with some discourses of special needs, draw on medical models of disability (Baumer & Frueh, 2021). The paper contends that there is a need to pay attention to the experiences, beliefs, and competencies of teachers, lecturers and other employees in HE regarding i) their own diversity and differences including, where applicable, their own neurodivergence (Hoben & Hessen, 2021) and ii) their attitudes towards their neurodivergent colleagues (Wissell et al., 2022). An employee is not the same as a student and insights from one context and set of relationships should not be simplistically transferred to another. Whilst there may be challenges commonly faced by people that are neurodiverse, it is a misguided assumption that these emerge in the same ways in every context whether as a student or an employee. The presentation draws on several research projects, both those explicitly using the neurodiversity paradigm and those adopting specific learning difference/ difficulty perspectives, to argue that the insights offered by the paradigm are a more fruitful way to understand the issues and address differences and diversity in higher education. It also analyses the problematic turn to pedagogical discourses in workforce management and the promotion of pedagogical leadership in the workplace, especially where it is presented as (yet another) leadership style, which deskills employees and removes their agency. The wider implications of the neurodiversity paradigm for theory, practice and policy around inclusion in higher education are explored drawing on the neurodiversity paradigm claim that social dynamics across forms of human diversity are similar, though contexts are not similar. Some limitations and constraints of the paradigm in researching diversity in HE are also considered.

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