Archbishop With Dyslexia Draws the Line Between Accommodating and Thriving

The motion before General Synod and what the church found

The Archbishop’s address opened debate on a formal motion titled “All Kinds of Minds: Affirming Neurodiversity in the Life of the Church” (GS 2444), prepared for the July 2026 General Synod session in York. The report behind the motion found that many churches remain shaped around neurotypical expectations, creating barriers for people with dyslexia, ADHD, autism, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, and Tourette syndrome.

The picture that emerged from interviews with neurodivergent clergy was direct: many said they felt pressure to conform to what the report described as “a busy, extroverted, often male archetype reinforced by church culture.” The report named “cultures of ableism” within the denomination. The motion calls for “neurodiversity champions” to be appointed in every diocese, alongside neurodivergent-led training directed at “challenging and transforming unjust structures and processes” that disadvantage neurodivergent clergy and worshippers.

Archbishop Mullally, who has spoken more publicly about her dyslexia in recent years, described the neurodiversity training she led as Bishop of London as “invaluable for our life together and the culture of the Diocese of London.” She said her dyslexia developed in her humility, empathy, emotional intelligence, and the ability to listen — qualities she described as coming together in teambuilding. She also gave the clearest version of her challenge to the church: not only functioning but flourishing, and in order to enable that, the church must prioritise its learning and its listening.

What the science says that the “gift” frame leaves out

The mainstream coverage of this story will center on the warmer angle: an Archbishop shares a personal dyslexia story, calls neurodiversity a “gift,” and the church takes a meaningful step toward inclusion. That frame is not wrong. It is incomplete in exactly the way that most institutional conversations about learning differences are incomplete, and the Archbishop herself pointed toward the gap.

Strengths do emerge from dyslexia — the Archbishop’s own account is evidence of that. But the research direction here [LEAN] is that those strengths are earned through productive engagement with the struggle, not handed over as compensation for it. Many people with dyslexia say that being told their condition is a gift makes the struggle feel erased rather than honored. The real takeaway from the Archbishop’s personal story is not that dyslexia produces gifts automatically — it is that she built something through years of navigating a world not designed for her brain. That is a very different story, and a more useful one for parents.

The harder, more actionable part of what she said is the “functioning vs. flourishing” distinction — and this is where research backs a stronger claim. Special education’s own evidence describes what happens when institutions provide accommodations because it is easier than addressing the actual gap: the support meant to scaffold skill development instead substitutes for it, and the incentive to build the underlying skill quietly disappears. A support that makes a child function is not the same thing as a support that builds a child’s capacity to thrive without it. The distinction is whether the support is a bridge toward independence or a permanent workaround for a reading difference that the right intervention could narrow.

The system the Archbishop named — shaped around neurotypical assumptions, treating compliance as the goal — is the same system most schools operate in. The church is not the villain here. “Good-enough inclusion” is: the institutional habit of treating visibility, representation, and accommodation as the finish line, when the harder work of building genuine capability has not started.

What “functioning vs. flourishing” looks like in practice for your child

The Archbishop’s framework is a practical diagnostic for parents. For any support your child receives — extended test time, a reading specialist, small-group instruction, an aide — the question worth asking is: Is this support building toward a skill, or is it managing the gap indefinitely? That is not a reason to remove accommodations. It is a reason to know why each accommodation exists and what it would take for it to no longer be needed.

The IDA’s 2025 definition of dyslexia — its first major update in 23 years — reinforces the possibility of change. It explicitly moved away from the old fixed-deficit model toward multi-system, intervention-responsive factors. Brain imaging research from Yale (Shaywitz) and Stanford (Temple) shows that children who struggle with reading develop the same reading pathways as typical readers after appropriate, intensive intervention. The brain builds new pathways with practice. Functioning is not the ceiling.

The tradeoff is real. Neurodivergent children who are accommodated without being genuinely supported in building skills sometimes learn to navigate around their challenges without closing the underlying gap. For some children, at some stages, that is the right call — there are genuine limits and accommodations serve a real purpose. But for most children in the early and middle years of schooling, the direction a support is pointing matters. Ask your child’s school: What skill is this support building? How will we know when it has done its job?