Communication and Connection: Supporting Vulnerable Children

Brief overview

This mini conference for primary school leaders aims to provide practical strategies to enable the most vulnerable children to become confident communicators. It will also look at how schools can build and enhance positive relationships with children and families.

We are thrilled to welcome Jean Gross CBE as our key-note speaker for the afternoon, along with Kent schools who will offer their perspective and work on these areas.

The first part of Jeans session - Closing the word gap - will explore communication and language issues for vulnerable and disadvantaged children, from lack of confidence to vocabulary gaps. She will focus on practical strategies to help all children become confident communicators: increasing opportunities for purposeful talk, scaffolding those opportunities so that everyone can take part, and having a school-wide approach to developing vocabulary.

Schools and policy makers are increasingly interested in belonging, or school connectedness, as a factor underpinning disengagement and attendance problems. To build the sense of belonging, we need to focus relentlessly on relationships – between children and the adults, between school and families, and between children themselves. In this second session Where do I belong?  Jean will discuss ways of building these relationships, even when it feels like a hard ask.

Jean is a popular speaker and national expert on educational disadvantage and special educational needs. Her best-selling books include Beating Bureaucracy in SEND (4th edition, 2023), Time to Talk (2017) and Reaching the Unseen Children: practical strategies to close stubborn attainment gaps in disadvantaged groups (2021).

She has been a teacher, an educational psychologist and head of children’s services in a local authority. She was formerly government Communication Champion for children,  headed the Every Child a Reader and Every Child Counts one-to-one tuition programmes, and led on inclusion within the government’s National Strategies. She was awarded a CBE for services to education in 2011.