The aim of this paper is to develop a fully discrete local discontinuous Galerkin method to solve a class of variable-order fractional diffusion problems. The scheme is discretized by a weighted-shifted Grünwald formula in the temporal discretization and a local discontinuous Galerkin method in the spatial direction. The stability and the L 2-convergence of the scheme are proved for all variable-order (t) ∈ (0, 1). The proposed method is of accuracyorder O(3 + h k+1) , where , h, and k are the temporal step size, the spatial step size, and the degree of piecewise P k polynomials, respectively. Some numerical tests are provided to illustrate the accuracy and the capability of the scheme.