This is a project, led by the University of Kent, in partnership with the University of Manchester, the University of Sheffield and University College London (see our ‘People‘ tab). Our Conversation for Social Interaction (CoSI) programme has been co-produced with teachers from the beginning. This started with a long period of consultation in the summer of 2022, which included a national questionnaire, detailed teacher interviews and teacher focus-group discussion. This helped us establish our first draft of the programme, guiding our development of teacher training materials and child-facing activities and materials.
From January 2024 to April 2026 the Nuffield Foundation funded a project, which aimed to co-develop and assess the feasibility and teacher acceptability of the Conversation for Social Interaction programme. First, we co-developed the CoSI together with teachers from four schools, a separate Teacher Advisory Group (see the advisory group tab) in incorporated advice from our over-arching advisory group. In a parallel sub-project, we explored the best ways to assess the children’s conversational ability.
The resulting programme was then implemented in six schools (three in Kent and three in Greater Manchester), including those serving areas of high socio-economic deprivation and multilingual communities. Teacher perspectives were gathered through interviews and focus groups with participating staff. We also carried out focus groups with additional primary teachers.
All six schools delivered the programme. We assessed 118 pupils across these six schools, Children showed statistically significant improvements in relevant responding and aspects of turn-taking, with medium effect sizes. However, without a control group, causal claims cannot yet be made. Most pupils (87%) reported real-life benefits, of which the following are some examples:
P1 “I let other people talk and I don’t speak loads so like I’m not taking over the whole conversation and not listening to other people”
P23 “I used to not chat at all like all I did was like chill in my room and then my mum said ‘Dinner’s ready’ and I didn’t even barely said anything I just ‘Ok’ but now I talk to my mum” 09:41
P25 “Yeah. With like not paying attention…..and letting them speak back”
P71 “if you got into a fight with your best friend you could chat about why you went into that fight and you can apologise”
P74 ” Well, you have to try and look out for body language to know if they if you’re chatting partners, enjoying your conversation”
P76 “I think it’s helped me be more confident when I talk to other people”
P82 “They’ve helped me think how to build on a chat”
P86 “to err to maybe like not dominate the chat and connect the statements and like just don’t change the sentence straight away”
P97 ” I was like the quiet kid, I didn’t I didn’t like to talk. Now I’m not really scared to talk in public”
P139 “If I’m talking to multiple people, I have to talk to all of them instead of one person”
Most participating teachers likewise described positive impacts on pupils (see two examples below) and emphasised the importance of conversational skills for group work across the curriculum and for managing peer disagreements.
“They just don’t have the stimulus at home. They just don’t have these kinds of conversations or they just don’t have, you know, the libraries at home …so they don’t have the language to talk creatively. So that really was my primary reason for wanting to do this programme. I knew that the social side [of the programme] was brilliant but I just needed them just to be able to talk. And if you say – if you gave them stimulus and said talk about this, the number of them who would literally just sit still and stare straight ahead and not even look at the person they were meant to be talking to at the beginning of the year. It was quite staggering and we’ve come so far from that now. But because I think the “in” was making it a social programme and you can talk about your favourite restaurant or you whether you want the cat or all the things that they wanted to talk about, that’s now the – what I’m seeing is if I give them something to talk about in writing or talk about in reading, they’ve got all the skills to be able to look at each other, make eye contact, and be engaged. So it’s had a huge impact on learning and that’s the hub of it for me” School 5 teacher
“They understand that everyone talks differently, so if someone’s more of a questioner or someone’s more quiet, that’s not a bad thing. There’s always things we can do to even out our conversation asking questions how they understand how their partner’s feeling as well, if they’re not listening and things like that, connecting statements as well, yeah.” School 6 teacher
Teachers from the feasibility study as well as teachers in other focus groups highlighted an increasing need for structured support for social communication in primary classrooms. This speaks to the need to develop children’s conversations skills within classroom contexts and links to findings from the recent Curriculum and Assessment Review which presents evidence that currently “attention to oracy is insufficient” and highlights “the need for the English curriculum to make speaking and listening requirements more prominent”. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/curriculum-and-assessment-review-final-report
