Primary Network webinar: Building an intentionally inclusive culture through the Primary Curriculum

Diversity is a fact, Equity a choice, Inclusion is an action and the outcome? Belonging.

Across the education landscape, it is becoming more and more appreciated that belonging has the potential to significantly boost engagement and productivity. So, what’s not to gain? If we are not intentionally inclusive, we are being unintentionally exclusive. This is why Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) efforts should not be a strategy add-on but central to a school’s culture. Central to the way the curriculum is built and taught and, more importantly, to the way educators engage with and support pupils.

Join the SSAT Primary Network webinar to hear from Ndah Mbawa, Chief Curation Officer at Happier Every Chapter, who will:

• Explore curriculum aligned ways to help build a culture that is more intentionally inclusive.
• Draw on statistics, anecdotes and stories from lived experience to illustrate the forms inclusion (intentional or otherwise) and (un)intentional exclusion might take.

We will also be joined by leaders from a Primary setting who will share their own journey of building an intentionally inclusive culture through curriculum design approaches to teaching and learning.

Speakers

Ndah Mbawa, Chief Curation Officer, Happier Every Chapter

After 20 years as a Freelance IT Consultant on multi-million pound programmes, Ndah now mostly lives out her passion for helping families, schools and corporates create academic and social impact by curating bestselling diverse and inclusive literature to nurture a culture to read for pleasure and shape the global outlook of children. Seeing the profound impact of a love of reading in the lives of two of her own children who published their debut novels at 12 and 10, she and her daughters have taken their mission to the road; delivering books, speaking engagements on intentional inclusion and creative writing workshops to inspire children to develop the skill and will to read and write for pleasure and schools to journey towards more inclusive classrooms.

Claire Bond, Senior Teacher, Evelina Hospital School

Claire has worked as a mainstream primary teacher in London schools for more than 30 years, predominantly in key stage two. She was a year 6 teacher for 17 years, Music lead and member of SLT in a primary school in South East London before moving to Hospital Education. She is currently the Senior Teacher at Evelina Hospital School where she has responsibility for leading the Arts team and managing day-to-day allocation of teachers to pupils on the ward and running of the classrooms. She is also responsible for promoting racial literacy and diversity and helping the school to achieve a silver Race and Equality Charter Mark in 2022.

In this session Claire will explain the journey to improve their Racial literacy offer to their diverse pupils in the hospital. This will include the work with Ndah at Happier Every Chapter – in practice – to audit their books and develop resources in their library and setting, use of materials and linking these to the curriculum plan and events.