ADHD and autism screening tools at work: what HR can and cannot use
A screening questionnaire is not a diagnosis — it changes the odds. Here is what the official free tools are, what a positive result actually means in a workplace, and where the employer's duty starts.
Why HR reaches for a questionnaire
When an employee says they may have ADHD or autism, the instinct is to establish whether it is true before spending money. That instinct is expensive and, legally, backwards. Under the Equality Act 2010 an employer must make reasonable adjustments when it knows, or could reasonably be expected to know, that an employee is disabled — and the Employment Appeal Tribunal confirmed in Stedman v Haven Leisure [2025] EAT 82 that the duty to make reasonable enquiries sits with the employer. No diagnosis is required for an adjustment.
The three names you will hear
ASRS-5 is the World Health Organization Adult ADHD Self-Report Screening Scale for DSM-5: six items, a cut-off of 14, free to use, copyright WHO. AQ-10 is the ten-item Autism Spectrum Quotient with a cut-off of 6, copyright the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge and free for clinicians and researchers to download from them. DIVA-5 is not a workplace screener at all: it is the structured diagnostic interview a clinician conducts at assessment, published by the DIVA Foundation. Download screeners from the copyright holder, never from a third-party copy.
What a positive score is worth
Screening accuracy depends on the starting likelihood. ASRS-5 has around 91% sensitivity and 96% specificity (Ustun et al., JAMA Psychiatry, 2017), so in a group where roughly a third genuinely have ADHD, a positive result means most — but not all — of those people do. AQ-10 was reported at 88% sensitivity and 91% specificity in its validation (Allison et al., 2012), but in an adult autism clinic specificity fell to 0.29 (Ashwood et al., Psychological Medicine, 2016): anxiety pushes scores up, and many autistic adults, particularly women, score below the cut-off. Treat a positive screen as a reason to look further and a negative screen as weak evidence of nothing.
What to do instead of diagnosing
Public occupational-health contracts treat a workplace needs assessment as the standard product — the report is required inside 21 working days, and diagnosis is described as exceptional. A needs assessment converts what the employee actually struggles with into named adjustments, and it does not depend on a clinical label. In England the employee can separately ask their GP for an NHS assessment under Right to Choose at no cost to the employer, and can apply to Access to Work themselves.
Record what you did
The defensible position is not 'we established the diagnosis'. It is 'we were told, we asked, we offered adjustments, we explained the routes, and here is the dated note'. Keep the record short, factual and free of clinical opinion.
Deciding what to do for an employee?
The employer decision hub walks through what the law expects, what each route costs and takes, and produces a dated record for the file — nothing is stored.
Open the employer decision hub →Frequently asked
- Can HR administer the ASRS-5 or AQ-10 to an employee?
- The tools are free to use, but scoring them does not produce a diagnosis and an employee cannot be required to complete one. Use them, if at all, as a shared prompt for a conversation about adjustments — not as a gate to support.
- Do we have to pay for an assessment?
- No. Reasonable adjustments do not require a diagnosis, a workplace needs assessment is the usual first spend, and in England the employee can be assessed on the NHS under Right to Choose at no cost to the employer.
- The employee scored below the cut-off. Is that the end of it?
- No. A negative screen is weak evidence, especially for autism in adults. If the difficulties are real, the adjustments question stands regardless of the score.
- What if we fund a private assessment and the GP won't accept the report?
- That is a real risk, and it leaves the employee without treatment and you with the same duty. Before committing spend, ask the provider whether their report is accepted by NHS GPs for shared care, and who prescribes and monitors afterwards.
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