What The Employment Rights Act 2025 Means for Probation

For years, the first two years of someone’s employment have worked as a safety net. If a hire did not work out, you had time. You could let things drift a little, have the awkward conversation late and still part ways without much legal risk because most employees could not bring an ordinary unfair dismissal claim until they had two years’ service.

That safety net is shrinking. From 1 January 2027, the qualifying period for ordinary unfair dismissal drops from two years to six months. ACAS has confirmed the change. At the same time the cap on unfair dismissal compensation is being removed entirely. So the window in which you can manage a new hire without that protection kicking in is now 6 months, not two years.

This means our managers need skills they could survive without before. The Act forces employers to get genuinely good at the first six months of employment, which means good onboarding, clear expectations, honest early feedback and proper support before anyone reaches for a formal process. And that exact skillset is the one I spend my days teaching managers for an entirely different reason because it is also what managing neurodivergent people well requires.

What is actually changing on 1 January 2027?

Let me be clear on the law first because there has been a lot of noise about it.

The original plan was to make unfair dismissal a day-one right. That was dropped after opposition in the House of Lords. The compromise is a six-month qualifying period instead. So from 1 January 2027, any employee with six months’ service or more is protected from ordinary unfair dismissal. Anyone you hire from around the start of July 2026 will reach that milestone by January and gain the right then.

The compensation cap is going too. Right now an ordinary unfair dismissal award is capped at the lower of 52 weeks’ pay or £118,223. From January 2027 that cap disappears, so awards will be based on actual loss. This means more employees protected, sooner, with bigger potential payouts.

What this does not change is everything that already applies from day one. Discrimination protection under the Equality Act 2010 has never needed a qualifying period and has never been capped. I will come back to that because it is the bit that catches people out.

Why this is a management problem, not a legal one

Read the guidance flying around at the moment and you will see the same words over and over. Defensible. Documented. Bulletproof. Risk. The advice is almost entirely about protecting the employer if a dismissal ends up in front of a tribunal.

That advice is not wrong. But it treats the symptom and misses the cause. The reason employers feel exposed is not that the law got stricter. It is that a lot of organisations have been managing the early months of employment badly for years and the two-year window has been covering for it. Even prior to it going up to 2 years in 2012 (prior to this it was 1 year), managers struggled to identify and tackle performance issues within the year, back then I often took at call at month 13 only for the employer to realise they’d missed their window. 2 years made a huge difference and going back down to 6 months will make an even bigger one.

If your probation process is a form someone fills in at month five, if expectations live in a job description nobody reopened after the interview, if the first proper feedback a struggling new hire gets is the meeting where you tell them it is not working then yes, six months is going to feel terrifyingly short. The fix is not better paperwork to defend a rushed decision. The fix is managing the first six months properly so the decision is rarely rushed in the first place.

What does good look like in the first six months?

This is the practical bit and none of it is complicated. Good early management looks like this:

• Onboarding that sets someone up to succeed, not a laptop and a login and a wave. New starters need to know what good performance actually looks like in their role, not just what the role is.
• Onboarding needs to have a plan, that takes into account the learning curve and where you need someone to be by month 5.
• Expectations that are explicit and written down. Vague is the enemy here. “Be more proactive” is not an expectation. “Send me a weekly summary of where each project stands by Friday lunchtime” is.
• Feedback that is early, regular and honest. The single most common mistake I see is managers saving up concerns for a formal review instead of raising them when they happen. By the time the review comes round, the employee has had no chance to fix anything and feels ambushed.
• Regular check-ins through probation, not one meeting at the end. A fortnightly or monthly conversation about how it is going turns probation from a verdict into a process.
• Genuine support when someone is struggling, offered before you start building a case against them. That means asking what is getting in the way and doing something about it. Notice that none of this is about being soft. It is about being clear. Clear expectations and honest feedback are kinder and more rigorous at the same time. The employee who is not right for the role finds out early, fairly, with a real chance to improve. And if they cannot, you have managed it properly rather than scrambling.

Where does neurodiversity collide with all of this?

Every single thing in that list above is also what good neurodiversity management looks like. Clear written expectations, early specific feedback, regular structured check-ins, support offered before judgement. These are not neurodiversity adjustments bolted onto normal management. They are simply good management and they happen to be the things neurodivergent employees need most.

Neurodivergent people are often the ones who struggle most in unstructured early employment. The reason is rarely that they cannot do the job. A new starter with ADHD may take longer to build the routines that make their output consistent. An autistic employee may read a vague brief completely literally and deliver exactly what was asked rather than what was meant. A dyslexic colleague may be brilliant in the work and slow on the written onboarding nobody gave them time to process. Drop any of these people into a poorly run first few months and they look like a bad hire. Give them clarity, structure and early feedback and they often turn out to be among your best people.

So the management upgrade the Act is forcing on you is the same upgrade I would be asking you to make anyway. You can read more on how to support neurodivergent employees if you want the detail but the headline is simple. Get better at managing the first six months for everyone and you get better at managing neurodivergent people without even labelling it as such.

The trap to avoid

There is a wrong way to respond to all this and I am already seeing it recommended. The wrong way is to treat six months as a deadline to exit people faster. Tighten the process, shorten probation, get the underperformers out before the clock runs down.

If you go down that road with a neurodivergent employee, you can walk straight into a far bigger problem than the one you were trying to dodge. Because the Equality Act applies from day one, with no qualifying period and no cap. If you dismiss someone in month three for performance that was affected by a disability you knew or should have known about, when you had not made reasonable adjustments, you may have a disability discrimination claim on your hands. The six-month change is irrelevant to that. It was always available.

Building the skill, not just the policy

You can rewrite every probation policy you own and still get this wrong because that’s really needed is not in the policy. It is in how your managers actually run those first six months, conversation by conversation. A policy that says “give regular feedback” does nothing if your line managers have never been taught how to give feedback that lands, how to set an expectation that cannot be misread or how to tell the difference between a hire who is wrong for the role and one who simply has not been managed yet.

That is the work I do. I help employers turn the Employment Rights Act 2025 from a compliance headache into a genuine lift in how their managers manage, with the neurodiversity understanding built in rather than treated as a separate module. The two belong together and right now the law has handed you a reason to deal with both at once.

If your managers are going to be making sharper decisions in a shorter window from January 2027, the time to train your managers to do this well is now, not after the first claim. If you want to talk through what that might look like for your team, book a free 30-minute call and we will work out where to start.