Adaptive teaching, differentiation and reasonable adjustments – what’s the difference?

Adaptive teaching, differentiation and reasonable adjustments – what’s the difference?
By Sarah Beynon, Head of Academic Support at Abingdon School

For many years, we were encouraged to differentiate our teaching. More recently the focus has been on adaptive teaching. Let’s not forget reasonable adjustments. If you’re confused, you’re not the only one! In this article, I outline the distinct aspects of these concepts, the key differences between them and the implications for our practice.

Tailoring our teaching: what differences do we see?

Whether teachers or students, we are not all the same; we learn at different rates and in different ways. Additionally, some students have further barriers that affect their learning to such an extent that they have an identified learning need (often called SEND) and it is these students who probably first spring to mind when you read or hear the terms in the title of this article. But it is not only SEND students who benefit from tailored teaching and all teachers, whether they are aware of it or not, modify their teaching during the course of a lesson in the interest of ensuring that every student is making progress.

To help make visible what can sometimes be invisible, here is an example:

As the students enter the classroom, they sit in their assigned seats. One student has a hearing impairment, so the teacher ensures that they are seated at the front to the right (a reasonable adjustment). The teacher introduces the lesson topic and the lesson begins. After some whole class teaching, a worksheet is given out and the students fill it in. The teacher notices that a couple of students are finding one question challenging, so goes over to talk to them (adaptive teaching), pointing them to the pages in the textbook they can use. One student is typing their work on their computer (reasonable adjustment). Some students finish quickly, before the majority of the class, so the teacher scans through their work, tells one to check their spelling of key words using the vocabulary checklist provided (adaptive teaching and reasonable adjustment) and gives another an extension task from the textbook (differentiation). The lesson continues when all have completed the core questions (differentiation).

So what do each of the terms mean and how are they implemented in the classroom?

Clarifying the differences: what does the literature say?
While adaptive teaching, differentiation and reasonable adjustments can overlap with one another to some extent, the terms should not be regarded as entirely interchangeable – they are not simply different words for the same strategy.

Differentiation has historically been seen as a way of meeting students’ needs by producing resources at different levels and accepting different outcomes, as outlined by Jon Eaton in his blog for the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), “Moving from ‘differentiation’ to ‘adaptive teaching”. This is evident in the example above by the acceptance that some students have completed more questions than others. Rightly or wrongly, the principle of differentiated instruction has become associated with, as Sarah Alston puts it, “giving different tasks to different students” and – consequently – additional workload for teachers and lowered expectations of students deemed less able.

Adaptive teaching, in contrast, is about helping all students meet high standards – “teaching to the top”. All students complete the same tasks but particular students will receive more or less (or simply different) support in the moment, depending on need. The move away from differentiation towards adaptive teaching occurred as it became increasingly evident that preparing a variety of individualised resources resulted in excessive and unsustainable teacher workload and made unwarranted and unhelpful assumptions about students’ capacity to achieve based on past performance or preconceived ideas of ability.

A useful summary of the differences between differentiation (as it has been widely interpreted) and adaptive teaching are outlined in the table below, based on the work of Jade Pearce (2024), Head of Education at Affinity Learning Partnership, in a flash seminar for Inner Drive. Her blog “Adaptive Teaching – explanations and modelling” gives further examples of adaptive teaching in practice.

Reasonable adjustments
All schools are legally required, in line with the Equalities Act 2010, to ensure the removal of barriers to learning for students with Special Educational Needs or Disabilities (SEND). At the same time, “reasonable adjustments” for SEND students often overlap significantly with providing high quality education for all students, regardless of ability or neurodiversity. As many teachers often say, “Good teaching for students with SEND is good teaching for all.”

The difference between adaptive teaching and reasonable adjustments can be about language as much as substance. Alex Quigley, in his blog post “Adaptive Teaching or Reasonable Adjustments”, states that, “small, carefully chosen adjustments that can have a beneficial impact on pupils can be classed as reasonable adjustments, but they could just as easily be classed as adaptive teaching approaches in the repertoire of teaching supporting all pupils to learn with success.”

This can be seen in the example of the class above, where the teacher scaffolds the work for some students through one-to-one conversations and for another student by use of a vocabulary checklist.

From theory to practice: what does this look like in the classroom?

What these approaches look like in the classroom will to an extent depend on circumstances. For example, here is how I define them, in the context of SEND.

Reasonable adjustments will be the strategies based on a student’s SEND profile. Typical reasonable adjustments might include 25% extra time, strategic seating and coloured exam papers.

Adaptive teaching is, fundamentally, “teaching to the top” while taking account of differing needs within a class. As such, it is fundamentally, “just good teaching”, beneficial for all learners, including those with SEND. Adaptive teaching involves both planning before the lesson (macro-adaptations) and small responsive changes within the lesson (micro-adaptations). Before the lesson, the teacher uses their experience to anticipate barriers to learning and plans how to address them. During the lesson, formative assessment (e.g. through questioning) is used to check learning and the teacher makes in-the-moment changes and adaptations to respond to students’ needs. For a more detailed explanation, see Gary Aubin’s blog, “What is adaptive teaching?”

Differentiation, to the extent that it varies from adaptive teaching, refers to the provision of more targeted and specialist support necessary for students “who have or may have SEN” (DfE 2015). The key reference point here is the SEND Code of Practice, which states that “Teachers are responsible and accountable for the progress and development of the pupils in their class, including where pupils access support from teaching assistants or specialist staff.” As the Code also puts it, “Every teacher is a teacher of SEND.” The Code goes on to emphasise that taking responsibility is accomplished by “high quality teaching, differentiated for individual pupils.” It should be practical for the teacher, not add to workload, and should not result in having lower expectations of some students.

A useful question all teachers can all ask ourselves is: “what do – or could – or should – adaptive teaching, differentiation and reasonable adjustments look like in my classroom?”

For me, the metaphor employed in Making Every Lesson Count (Allison and Tharby 2015) best illustrates the distinctiveness of the approaches. Students are set the task of scaling the wall; they have different length ladders at their disposal, so are more or less able to do this. Recognising this and providing longer ladders from the top of the wall is a reasonable adjustment; having these ladders ready to lower represents differentiation and the act of spotting how far up the person climbing from the bottom has got and then knowing when and how far to lower the ladder is adaptive teaching. All are expected to reach the top of the wall: we have high expectations of every student!

References:

Allison, S and Tharby, A (2015) Making Every Lesson Count: Six principles to support great teaching and learning. Crown House.
Alston, S (2024) ‘Adaptive Teaching or Differentiation?’ SecEd, (accessed 8/7/2025)
Aubin, G. (2024) ‘EEF Blog: Five-a-day for pupils with SEND – a cluster of adaptive approaches’, Education Endowment Foundation, (accessed 8/7/2025)
DfE (2015) Special educational needs and disability code of practice: 0 to 25 years, Department for Education and Department for Health
Eaton, J. (2022) ‘EEF blog: Moving from ​‘differentiation’ to ​‘adaptive teaching’, Education Endowment Foundation, (accessed 8/7/2025)
EEF (not dated) ‘1. High Quality teaching’, Education Endowment Foundation, (accessed 8/7/2025)
Pearce, J. (2024) ‘Adaptive Teaching: Explanations and Modelling’ (blog), InnerDrive (accessed 8/7/2025)
Quigley, A. (2024) ‘Adaptive Teaching or reasonable adjustments’ (blog), Alex Quigley (accessed 8/7/2025)