Sara Griffiths is an experienced senior manager with over 35 years’ experience in Attendance, Early Help, and Safeguarding in Education. She has worked as an employee, independent consultant and national trainer across a range of health, education, social care and multi disciplinary teams and within and across Local Authorities and MATs. She is passionate about improving outcomes for children and young people.

She is a national expert in the field of school attendance and is a former President of NASWE, the professional organisation that supports all those working in the field of school attendance. She has active links with other national and international organisations which have the same aims and is currently collaborating on a submission on the Recording, Reporting, and Use of School Attendance Data in England which will contribute to an international comparison of the variations within and across a number of countries.

She has managed attendance services both for Local Authorities and a large national MAT and has written and delivered a range of training locally and nationally on attendance, exclusions and Early Help. Within wider Children’s Services, she has held lead roles in Early Help, Integrated Children’s Services, Troubled Families, Performance Management and Quality Assurance , Single Point of Access and Change Management.

Currently, Sara is working directly with the DfE to support the delivery of improvements in Local Authorities and MATs, providing direct support to some schools and is the Behaviour and Attendance link governor for a local secondary school.

Sarah Johnson has worked in education for the last nineteen years. As a qualified teacher, Sarah has enjoyed roles in mainstream schools, Pupil Referral Units, Alternative Provision and psychiatric in-patient services. Sarah is the author of the book ‘Behaving Together: A Teacher’s Guide to Nurturing Behaviour’ and two upcoming books published by Routledge on Social and Emotional Mental Health. As a member for the Department of Education’s Alternative Provision stakeholder group, she has supported development of policy such as the recent SEND and AP green paper as well as chairing a range of panels and events within the education sector.

Erin Docherty is a mental health nurse with a decade of NHS experience working with children and adolescents. Erin has led primary mental health teams and more recently set up the Mental Health Support Team across Birmingham. Erin now works full time for Oasis embedding the whole school approach across academies and ensuring the senior mental health leads are well supported.

Jonathan Taylor is the CEO of Sapientia Education Trust and from April 2023 was additionally appointed CEO of the Seckford Education Trust. The combined Trusts run 21 schools in Norfolk and Suffolk, 10 Secondary Schools and 11 primary Schools. These range from small rural primaries to urban fringe and inner-city schools. Sapientia also runs two state boarding schools, including Wymondham College the largest state boarding school nationally.

Jonathan is an active NLE, mentors other CEO’s and serves on the DfE’s Norwich priority board.

My career in teaching has been a successful one – working as a Head Teacher for the past 9 years.  Starting as an acting Head of School in 2013, at Barclay Primary School (Ofsted Outstanding Spring 2016 and again in November 2021) I gained invaluable experience in leading and managing a 6FE Primary from Nursery to Year 6.

When the opportunity to lead Brook House Primary School as Headteacher in September 2015 was offered to me, the predecessor free school was previously graded Inadequate and was re-brokered by the Department to the Lion Academy Trust.

With a falling roll, significant issues around parental and pupil engagement with high levels of absence and poor attendance, the initial focus was on delivering an effective strategy to meet the vision and ethos of the Lion Trust whilst delivering a relentless drive to raise standards. OFSTED graded the school “Good’ with outstanding Leadership and Management and Personal Development and Welfare 15 months later in December 2016 and the follow-up Section 8 inspection in December 2022 judged the school to continue to be a Good School with enough evidence of improved performance to suggest that the school could be judged outstanding if a section 5 inspection was to be carried out.

The school now has an unauthorised absence rate of 3%, overall attendance of 95.5% (academic year 2021-22) and is a beacon school in the locality of pupil and parental engagement.

In addition,  I now act at Executive Headteacher supporting a further Lion Academy Trust School (Leigh Beck Junior School) in Canvey Island, Essex. By implementing the same urgent transformational programmes, there has been significantly improved standards, attendance and parent satisfaction with how the school is being run. The first OFSTED in January 2022, since conversion into the Trust, saw Leigh Beck judged to be a Good School for the first time in its history.

Assistant Service Manager for Inclusion and Attendance at Sheffield City Council. Leading on school attendance, and education safeguarding. Worked in attendance focused roles for over 15 years across several Local Authorities. Currently leading the Attendance Support Teams who provided the termly attendance support meetings to the 189 schools in the city. Since the Working Together to Improve Attendance guidance was launched, 99% of schools in Sheffield have received termly attendance support meetings, with 83% attending termly networking sessions too. In April 2022 Sheffield launched its Attendance Charter, with partners across Education, Health, and Care pledging to create an ethos of Excellence in Attendance.

Catherine Gladwell is Refugee Education UK’s founder and Chief Executive. REUK works across the country equipping refugee children and young people to build more hopeful futures through education. Each year they work alongside around 700 young people through their own education support and advice programmes, support several hundred schools, further education colleges and universities, conduct research and influence policy.

Alongside her work at REUK, she is a director and research advisor for Jigsaw Education, where she specialises in international refugee education. Catherine has led and consulted on refugee education research and programmes for international agencies including Unicef, UNHCR, Save the Children and many others. She holds degrees from Oxford University and the University of London, is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Winchester and an Honorary Associate Professor of Refugee Education at the University of Nottingham.

As the current Headteacher of Wandsworth Hospital Schools and Home Tuition Services I am passionate about creating inspirational learning opportunities and environments for some of the most disengaged and disenfranchised learners. Having taught and led in mainstream, special education and alternative provision, I have an established record of raising standards of teaching and learning, innovative curriculum design, increased pupil engagement and wellbeing.

Since 2017 I have been both the education officer for children with medical needs in Wandsworth and the Headteacher of two outstanding hospital schools (mental health and general medical at SWLSTG Trust in south London) and extended outreach services for children and young people out of school due to medical and/or mental health conditions including EBSA (Emotional based school avoidance). The dual role has given me a unique insight into barriers, and an ability to enact solutions for some of our most vulnerable and disengaged children and young people.

As a headteacher I lead a knowledgeable and passionate team who teach and advocate for students who have often experienced multiple failed educational, social and medical interventions. Both I and my team understand that our support for young people and their schools can be vital in securing a positive future for our young people

As the education officer for children and young people with medical needs I review medical information, EHC plans and educational reports in order to advise schools, medical professionals and families on appropriate educational provision for students. Over time I have utilised learning from these cases to generate school guidance on best practice for children with health needs. In 2023, having observed a pattern of growing needs in this cohort, I completed a Master’s in research (MRES) with distinction, exploring commonalities and causal factors in school experiences of students experiencing EBSA and mental ill health.

Jane Green MBE, MA Ed. ex.Asst. Headteacher, Adv.Dip.Ed. (Child Dev.), PGCE Sec. QTS, BSc (HONS) Psych. Founder & Chair SEDSconnective,
is an educationalist, ex Assistant Headteacher, lead for autism education in all phases of autism education.

She is Founder and Chair of SEDSConnective a neurodivergent (autistic, ADHD, dyspraxic, Tourettes plus) and symptomatic hypermobility (Ehlers-Danlos syndromes EDS, Hypermobility Spectrum Disorders HSD, JH) user led and voluntary charity transforming Neurodivergent health and wellbeing in education.

She is a non Exec Director sitting on the Social Care Institute of Excellence, EDI, Carers Support West Sussex, Policy lead at Time4Autism and policy contributor to NIHR ARC KSS.  She has been WAGE and coChair of the strategic oversight group for the OMMT in autism.  She was partner in the HealthEd.Eng APSW and other guidances. She championed the school toolkit for other charities and led the education content, plus writes various articles and education press publications and other research currently.  She was co-author on the recent peer reviewed paper in https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13575279.2022.2149471below  She presented with SEDSConnective Patron,  Dr Eccles,  on the International Network of school Attendance in the Netherlands last year on Neurodivergence, symptomatic hypermobility and EBSA. She is disabled, neurodivergent and an autistic parent carer for her eldest neurodivergent adult child.

Jon originally trained as an adolescent specialist nurse before moving to an advisor to a strategic health authority and then went onto a role as a young people’s health service commissioner. He worked briefly as an advisor to two World Health Organisation projects before becoming the lead for early help provision and multi-agency working in a large local authority. He became an education safeguarding advisor 9 year ago and for the last three years has worked as the Director of Safeguarding & Mental Health for a very large multi-academy trust. In his spare time he is a voluntary youth worker, and independent listener in a specialist boarding school and is studying for his PhD. When (if) he ever relaxes he is a keen fan of Korean drama.