Does the Equality Act 2010 duty to make reasonable adjustments apply at director level?

Yes. The Equality Act 2010 does not distinguish by seniority. The duty to make reasonable adjustments applies once the employer knows, or could reasonably be expected to know, about the employee's disability. A dyslexic director at any level can request adjustments to meeting format, paper circulation timescales, agenda structure, or minute-taking arrangements.

Can Access to Work fund a support worker for board meeting minute-taking?

Yes. A support worker who handles meeting documentation is a legitimate Access to Work claim. The Access to Work annual award cap for 2026-27 is £69,260 (DWP, May 2026), and most support worker arrangements cost considerably less than this. You apply through the DWP Access to Work scheme. Costs can be shared between the employer and the government depending on the employer's size.

How do I chair a board meeting with dyslexia without disclosing it to other board members?

All four adjustments in this article can be implemented as governance improvements without any disability disclosure to the board. A standing paper deadline, delegated minutes, an agenda format with page references, and verbal author summaries at the start of each item are standard practice in well-run boards. You can introduce all of them in the chair's role without reference to your dyslexia. If you need them documented as formal reasonable adjustments, that conversation is with HR or the company's senior leadership, not necessarily the full board.

Chairing with dyslexia: 4 adjustments that work

Q: Can a dyslexic board chair request advance circulation of papers as a reasonable adjustment?

Yes. The UK Corporate Governance Code (FRC, 2024) already requires that directors receive information in sufficient time to prepare for board meetings. For a dyslexic chair who processes papers through text-to-speech or AI summarisation, sufficient time means considerably more than 24 hours. A fixed advance paper deadline is a reasonable adjustment under the Equality Act 2010. It can be introduced as a general governance upgrade without any disability disclosure to the full board.

517 employment tribunal cases involving neurodivergent conditions were decided in England and Wales in 2025, a 95% rise in five years (Irwin Mitchell, February 2026). Dyslexia is consistently among the most cited conditions. The cases that tend to land aren't about junior employees who couldn't follow a policy.

They involve people who built long careers, compensated quietly for years, and hit a specific high-stakes situation where the compensation stopped working. For directors and board-level leaders, that situation is often the meeting room.

When you're an attendee, you can stay quiet. You can contribute where you've prepared and hold back on the sections you haven't fully absorbed. When you're the chair, you're directing discussion across every item. You're expected to respond in real time when the CFO says "can everyone go to page 47." You're accountable for the meeting output, including the minutes, whether or not you write them.

The 40-page board pack you processed by AI summary and text-to-speech the evening before works well enough for your own preparation. In the room, live discussion makes a different demand. And the gap between what you prepared and what the room expects tends to show up in specific moments that are hard to predict and harder to recover from smoothly.

The four adjustments below close that gap. Each one is either standard governance practice already or indistinguishable from it. You can implement all of them without disclosing your dyslexia to anyone. But if you want them documented as formal reasonable adjustments, the Equality Act 2010 requires your employer to consider every one, at any seniority level.

Why the meeting room is the exposure point

Most dyslexic directors have solved the preparation problem. They've built systems: text-to-speech on the commute, AI summaries the evening before, a PA who flags key numbers across a dozen papers in advance. If you haven't built that system yet, the board pack preparation article covers it step by step.

What's harder to prepare for is the pace of the live meeting. Discussions jump between papers. Someone raises a detail from an appendix that didn't appear in any executive summary. The chair is expected to hold all of it simultaneously while managing the agenda, the clock, and the people in the room.

Dyslexia affects phonological processing and working memory. Both are required for rapid verbal recall of written material under pressure. The cognitive load of live board discussion is high for anyone. Add that processing component and the load increases in ways that are invisible to everyone else in the room.

The four adjustments below reduce that load at source. They change the structure of the meeting itself, before you walk through the door.

If you've solved the preparation problem but the meeting room still feels unpredictable, the issue is structural. Structural problems have structural solutions.

1 Fix a standing paper deadline

The UK Corporate Governance Code (FRC, 2024) states that directors should receive information in sufficient time to prepare thoroughly for board meetings. It doesn't define what "sufficient" means in practice.

For a dyslexic chair who processes documents by text-to-speech or AI summarisation, sufficient time means considerably more than 24 hours. A fixed submission deadline, set well before the meeting, is the adjustment. Many well-run boards operate on a Wednesday-by-noon rule for a Monday meeting. It's a common governance convention, and it gives everyone in the room more time to prepare, not just you.

Set this as a standing rule. One email to whoever coordinates your board pack: "From the next meeting, I need all papers submitted by [day] at [time]. Please build this into the standing instructions for all paper authors." No explanation required beyond wanting time to prepare thoroughly.

Your whole board benefits from earlier papers. That's what makes this adjustment possible to implement without any disability context, if you prefer. But if you want it documented as a formal reasonable adjustment, the reasonable adjustments builder drafts the request for you, framed around your role and your specific challenges.

The paper deadline is the lever that makes everything else possible. Fix it before any other change.

2 Delegate minutes as a matter of course

You cannot take accurate minutes while chairing a complex discussion. Any chair who tries ends up doing both things badly.

The chair's job is to direct the discussion, watch the clock, manage the dominant voices, and close each agenda item on a clear decision or next action. A chair who is simultaneously scribing has divided attention in the one role where undivided attention matters most.

Company secretaries exist for exactly this reason. If your board has one, the delegation is already standard practice. If you're at a smaller organisation where the chair has historically taken notes, change the practice. Designate a board member or a senior administrator to take the record. This is good meeting management. It needs no justification.

If you want Access to Work to fund a support worker specifically for meeting documentation, that's a legitimate claim. The Access to Work annual cap is £69,260 for 2026-27 (DWP, May 2026), and most support arrangements cost a fraction of that. The Access to Work calculator shows you what a specific arrangement would cover and what you're entitled to claim.

£69,260

The Access to Work annual award cap for 2026-27 (DWP, May 2026). A support worker for meeting documentation sits within this as a legitimate claim. Most arrangements cost considerably less than the cap.

If your employer pushes back on formalising the minutes delegation, the Equality Act 2010 requires them to consider the adjustment once they know about your dyslexia. The case for it is both a governance argument and a legal one.

Stop taking notes while chairing. The quality of your chairing matters more than producing first-draft minutes in the room.

3 Set the agenda format and keep it consistent

Most board agendas list item names. Better ones list the paper number and page reference alongside each item.

Item 4: Finance committee report (Paper 3, pp.12–18)

The kind of agenda format that takes five seconds to add and changes how prepared you feel before each item opens

Before each item, you know exactly which pages are in scope. You processed Paper 3 the night before. You know what pages 12 to 18 cover. The link between your preparation and the live discussion is explicit, not something you're reconstructing in real time as the conversation starts.

You write the agenda, or you set the template for whoever writes it. One conversation with your PA or company secretary: "Going forward, every agenda item should include the paper number and page range." Done.

Other board members will find clear page references useful. Most do. That's what makes this a governance upgrade you can introduce without framing it as a personal accommodation.

An agenda with page references costs ten minutes to standardise and changes how grounded you feel before each discussion point opens.

4 Build in author summaries as standing practice

At the start of each substantive agenda item, the paper author speaks for two minutes: key finding, proposed action, what the board needs to decide today.

This is already recommended governance practice. The point of a board meeting is to discuss, interrogate, and decide. It's not to silently re-read papers that were circulated in advance. A verbal summary before discussion opens keeps less-prepared members at the same starting point and sharpens the debate that follows.

For you, it does something specific. It gives you 120 seconds to connect the summary version you processed the night before with what's on the page in front of you. Two minutes of structured context before the room starts talking is a significant reduction in the "where are we in the document" pressure that builds when discussion jumps ahead of your processing.

Introduce it as a meeting management change: "From next meeting, I'd like every paper author to open with a two-minute summary of their key recommendation before we discuss." Most boards welcome this. It cuts time and focuses debate. You're introducing a practice that benefits the whole room, and happens to solve a specific problem you haven't named.

Two minutes per paper, introduced as a meeting management upgrade. That's the full cost of this adjustment.

The call

Fix the paper deadline this week. Before your next meeting, send one email setting the submission schedule. Everything else follows from having papers in time to process them.

Then pick one more. The agenda format is the lowest-friction change and the quickest to implement. The minutes delegation may need a conversation, but it's a strong governance argument on its own terms. The author summaries are worth proposing at your next board and seeing how they land.

All four of these adjustments are ones you could introduce tomorrow as "governance improvements to how we run meetings." You don't need to disclose your dyslexia to do that. But if you want them in writing as formal reasonable adjustments, the reasonable adjustments builder generates the request based on your role. The disclosure guide covers timing and approach if you haven't told your employer about your dyslexia yet and you're working out whether to.

You're not asking for anything that goes beyond what good governance already recommends. You're asking for it to be consistent, in writing, and applied every time.