Why teachers use TES
TES (formerly the Times Educational Supplement) hosts over 900,000 teaching resources created by educators worldwide. It's used by more than 13 million educators globally, and for UK teachers it's often the first stop when looking for worksheets, lesson plans, assessments, and display materials. The range is enormous — from EYFS phonics activities to A-level revision guides, from KS1 maths problem-solving tasks to GCSE English comprehension papers.
Many resources are free; premium resources are typically affordable. The community aspect matters too: these are resources made by practising teachers who know what works in their classrooms. A Year 4 teacher in Leeds can download a science worksheet created by a Year 4 teacher in Bristol, confident that it's been tested with real pupils. That practical, peer-to-peer sharing is what makes TES so valuable.
The problem with one-size-fits-all resources
Most TES resources are designed as a single PDF or Word document at one reading level, with one font, one layout. This works well if every pupil in your class reads at the same level and has identical accessibility needs — which, of course, never happens. A Year 5 worksheet written at a reading age of 11 is inaccessible to pupils reading at age 7 or 8. A densely formatted PDF with small text and tight spacing creates barriers for pupils with visual stress or dyslexia.
The resource itself might be excellent — great content, well-structured activities, carefully chosen questions. But its formatting makes it exclusive rather than inclusive. A pupil who can't access the text can't engage with the learning, regardless of how good the content is. And so the teacher faces a choice: use the resource as-is and accept that some pupils will struggle, or spend time adapting it to meet everyone's needs.
What “adapting” a resource actually involves
When teachers talk about adapting a TES resource, they typically mean some combination of the following:
Reformatting for accessibility — changing font, size, spacing, and background colour to meet individual pupils' needs. A pupil with dyslexia might need a sans-serif font at 14pt with 1.5× line spacing on a cream background, following the BDA Dyslexia Style Guide. A pupil with visual stress might need a pastel background and larger text.
Adjusting reading level — simplifying vocabulary and sentence structure for pupils who need it, or adding extension questions for those who need more challenge. The core content stays the same; the language wrapping it changes.
Modifying content — adding scaffolding such as word banks, sentence starters, or visual prompts, or removing elements that create unnecessary cognitive load. Sometimes a worksheet tries to do too much on a single page, and breaking it into sections makes it more manageable.
Changing the format — converting a text-heavy worksheet into a more visual format, or breaking a long activity into smaller chunks. Some pupils work better with shorter, focused tasks rather than a single page of 20 questions.
The manual workflow — and why it doesn't scale
Here's what adapting a TES resource looks like without automation: download the PDF. Open it in Word — hoping the formatting survives the conversion (it often doesn't). Reformat for pupil A's needs: change font to Arial 14pt, increase line spacing, change background to cream. Save as PDF. Go back to the original. Reformat for pupil B: OpenDyslexic font, pale blue background, simplified vocabulary. Save. Repeat for pupil C, D, E.
Now multiply that by every worksheet, for every lesson, across the week. For a class of 30 with even 5 or 6 pupils needing different adaptations, this is hours of work. The PDF-to-Word conversion alone is often a headache — tables break, images shift, fonts change, and you spend as long fixing the conversion artefacts as you do making the actual adaptations.
Most teachers simply can't sustain it. So they default to printing the same version for everyone and hoping for the best. The intention to differentiate is there, but the time isn't. And the pupils who need adapted resources the most are the ones who miss out.
A better approach with Adaptify
Adaptify takes the same TES resource and handles the adaptation automatically. The workflow is straightforward:
Upload the resource — PDF, Word document, or even a photo of a printed worksheet. Adaptify extracts the content and structure, identifying headings, questions, body text, and any other elements. There's no need to convert between formats yourself.
Review the extracted content — check that the structure has been correctly identified. If a heading has been misidentified as body text, or a question has been split across two blocks, you can adjust it. This step takes a minute or two and ensures the adapted versions are accurate.
Select your class — Adaptify already knows each pupil's accessibility profile (font, size, spacing, background colour) and reading level. These profiles are set up once and applied automatically to every resource you create.
Generate and download — Adaptify produces individually formatted versions for every pupil. One upload, thirty downloads. Each version has the same core content, adapted to that pupil's specific needs. The whole process takes minutes, not hours.
What Adaptify adds beyond reformatting
Per-pupil formatting: each pupil gets their preferred font, size, line spacing, and background colour, applied automatically from their profile. No manual reformatting. A pupil who needs OpenDyslexic on a cream background gets exactly that; a pupil who reads comfortably in Arial on white gets that instead. Every version is individually tailored.
Reading level adaptation: vocabulary and sentence complexity are adjusted to match each pupil's reading level — not dumbed down, but made accessible. The core concepts and learning objectives stay the same. A Year 6 pupil reading at age 8 still engages with the same Year 6 content, but the language is pitched at a level they can access independently.
Batch generation: the whole class gets their version from a single upload. No copy-paste-reformat loop. This is the difference between adapting one resource in an evening and adapting every resource for every lesson.
Consistency: every resource, every lesson gets the same level of adaptation — not just the ones you have time for on a quiet Sunday afternoon. Pupils receive consistently accessible materials, which builds their confidence and independence over time.
Works with any format
TES resources come in many formats: PDF, Word (.docx), PowerPoint, and sometimes just images. Adaptify handles PDFs and Word documents natively. For printed worksheets or screenshots, you can photograph them and upload the image — Adaptify will extract the text and structure automatically.
This matters because many of the best TES resources are PDFs that can't be easily edited in Word. Teachers often find a brilliant worksheet, download it, and then realise it's a locked PDF with no editable source file. Previously, that meant either retyping the whole thing or using it as-is. Adaptify sidesteps the problem entirely: upload the PDF, and the content is extracted regardless of the original format.
Beyond TES
While this guide focuses on TES resources, the same approach works with resources from Twinkl, Primary Resources, Teacher Toolkit, or any other source. It also works with your own worksheets and materials — anything you've created in Word, exported as a PDF, or even handwritten and photographed.
The principle is the same: take any resource, adapt it for every pupil's needs, without the manual reformatting. Whether you're using a free TES download for tomorrow's lesson or a worksheet you created five years ago and have been printing unchanged ever since, Adaptify turns a single source document into individually adapted versions for your whole class.