The shift from “differentiation” to “adaptive teaching”
For years, Ofsted inspectors looked for “differentiation” — typically understood as providing different tasks or resources for different groups of pupils. In practice, this often meant three worksheets labelled with traffic-light colours or chilli peppers, each aimed at a fixed “ability” group. The 2019 Education Inspection Framework (EIF) deliberately moved away from this language, replacing it with “adaptive teaching.”
The change was more than cosmetic. Ofsted's quality of education judgement now asks whether teachers “adapt teaching in a responsive way” — the emphasis is on flexibility and responsiveness, not on pre-sorted groupings. Inspectors are explicitly told not to look for differentiated worksheets as evidence of good teaching. What they want to see is teachers responding to what pupils actually need in the moment, informed by ongoing assessment.
The Early Career Framework (ECF), which underpins the first two years of every new teacher's career, reinforces this through Standard 5: “Adaptive Teaching.” The ECF states that effective teachers “adapt lessons, whilst maintaining high expectations for all, so that all pupils have the opportunity to meet expectations” and that they should “avoid creating distinct tasks for different groups.” The message is clear: the same ambitious curriculum for everyone, with the scaffolding and support varied around it.
What adaptive teaching actually looks like in practice
If adaptive teaching isn't three colour-coded worksheets, what is it? At its core, it means keeping the curriculum content constant — every pupil engages with the same key concepts, the same core questions, the same learning objectives — while varying the support structures around that content.
This might mean providing a worked example alongside a problem set, so that pupils who need it can refer back while those who don't can push ahead. It might mean using strategic questioning during a task — asking a pupil to explain their reasoning, prompting with a hint, or redirecting a misconception — rather than handing out a different sheet. It might mean structuring a task so that every pupil begins with the same accessible entry point and the challenge emerges naturally as they progress.
Crucially, adaptive teaching is informed by formative assessment. It's not about guessing in advance which pupils will struggle; it's about checking understanding as you go and adjusting accordingly. A mini-whiteboard check at the start of independent practice tells you who needs support right now — and that group might be completely different tomorrow.
Three practical strategies for the classroom
1. Scaffolding that fades
Scaffolding is the most powerful tool in the adaptive teaching toolkit. The key is that scaffolds are temporary — they support pupils until they can manage independently, then they are removed. Effective scaffolds include worked examples (showing the complete process before asking pupils to attempt it), sentence starters or paragraph frames (especially useful in writing-heavy subjects), vocabulary glossaries printed alongside the task, and visual prompts such as diagrams, number lines, or graphic organisers.
The important point is that scaffolding doesn't reduce the demand of the task. A pupil using sentence starters is still writing a full paragraph; they just have a structure to lean on. Over time, as confidence and competence grow, the scaffolds are faded — first the sentence starters disappear, then the worked example, until the pupil is working independently.
2. Flexible grouping
One of the most harmful legacies of the old differentiation model is fixed ability grouping — the same six pupils always sitting on the “bottom table,” always receiving the easier worksheet. Research consistently shows that this entrenches disadvantage: pupils in lower groups receive a narrower curriculum, develop lower self-expectations, and rarely move up.
Flexible grouping means forming groups based on the specific task at hand. A pupil who struggles with algebraic manipulation might excel at spatial reasoning; a confident reader might find inference questions challenging. Groups should be task-specific, temporary, and regularly reshuffled. This sends a clear message: needing support on this topic doesn't define you as a learner.
3. Universal design with built-in stretch
Rather than creating three separate worksheets, design one resource that is accessible to all pupils at its base level, with stretch built in. This might look like a set of questions that increase in complexity (so everyone starts at question 1, but some pupils reach question 10 while others consolidate at question 5), or a task with an “explain your reasoning” extension that adds depth without requiring a separate resource.
The advantage of this approach is that it maintains high expectations for everyone. No pupil is handed a sheet that implicitly says “we don't expect as much from you.” Every pupil sees the same questions and knows what the full task looks like — the variation is in how far they get and how much support they use along the way.
What the evidence says about differentiation
The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) draws on a meta-analysis by Deunk et al. (2018), which examined the effects of differentiated instruction across 26 studies. The overall effect size was +0.15 standard deviations — a modest but positive impact. However, the picture becomes more interesting when you look at the sub-analyses: studies where technology was used to support differentiation showed a notably larger effect size of +0.29.
This finding aligns with what many teachers intuitively know: differentiation works best when it's precise and consistent, and technology can help achieve both. A tool that automatically adjusts reading level, font size, or scaffolding removes the bottleneck of teacher time and ensures that adaptations actually happen for every pupil, every lesson — not just when there are spare hours in the evening.
The EEF also cautions against rigid ability grouping. Their teaching and learning toolkit entry on “Setting or Streaming” reports a negative average impact, particularly for lower-attaining pupils. The evidence supports adaptive approaches — flexible, responsive, and ambitious for all — rather than sorting pupils into fixed tracks with different curricula. The EEF's guidance report on making best use of teaching assistants further reinforces the point: support should supplement high-quality teaching, not replace it with a watered-down alternative.
Why formatting is an overlooked differentiation lever
Most discussions of adaptive teaching focus on content and task design: what questions to ask, how to scaffold, when to intervene. But there is another dimension of differentiation that is rarely discussed in CPD sessions or teaching standards — formatting.
Consider a pupil with visual stress (sometimes called Meares-Irlen syndrome). They might be perfectly capable of engaging with year-group-appropriate content, but a worksheet printed in a small serif font on bright white paper with tight line spacing creates a genuine barrier to access. Change the font to a clean sans serif, increase the spacing to 1.5 lines, and set the background to cream or a soft pastel, and the same content becomes significantly easier to read. The curriculum hasn't changed — the access has.
This applies across a wide range of SEND needs. Pupils with dyslexia benefit from specific formatting adjustments — the BDA Dyslexia Style Guide sets out detailed recommendations covering font choice, spacing, colour, and layout. Pupils with visual impairments may need larger text or higher contrast. Pupils who are still developing reading fluency benefit from simplified vocabulary and shorter sentences, even when the underlying concepts remain age-appropriate. Formatting is itself a form of scaffolding — and like all scaffolding, it can be individualised and faded over time.
The workload reality
The DfE's Working Lives of Teachers and Leaders Survey 2025 found that teachers in England work an average of 50.1 hours per week. That figure has remained stubbornly high for years, and resource preparation is consistently cited as one of the biggest contributors. Creating a single worksheet is already a significant time investment; creating multiple adapted versions of that worksheet — adjusting reading level, reformatting for accessibility, adding scaffolding for some pupils while removing it for others — can double or triple the time required.
This is the central tension of adaptive teaching. The principle is right: pupils deserve resources that meet them where they are. But any differentiation strategy that relies on teachers manually producing multiple versions of every resource is not sustainable. Teachers know this, and the result is often a compromise — one version of the worksheet, perhaps with a generic coloured overlay for pupils who need it, and a hope that verbal scaffolding in the lesson will fill the gaps. The intention is good, but the execution falls short of what pupils actually need.
The most promising approaches to adaptive teaching are those that reduce teacher workload rather than adding to it. If differentiation happens automatically — if a single resource can be transformed into thirty individually adapted versions without manual reformatting — then the barrier between intention and practice disappears. Teachers can focus on the pedagogical decisions (what to teach, how to scaffold, when to stretch) and let the formatting, reading-level adjustment, and accessibility adaptations happen in the background.
That's the approach Adaptify takes. Upload a single worksheet, and Adaptify generates individually adapted versions for every pupil in your class — each one formatted to their accessibility profile and reading level. The differentiation that would take an evening of reformatting happens in minutes, and it happens consistently across every resource, every lesson.