Imagine If... 2025

Our annual Imagine If... conference is back this autumn at the Great North Museum: Hancock to celebrate its ten year anniversary.

The conference will take place on Thursday 13 November 2025, 9.30am – 4.30pm.

Places are free but limited – book now to secure your spot.

This year we are holding Imagine if… In partnership with The North East Combined Authority focusing on the three priorities in their Excellence in Education programme – inclusion, realising potential and teacher wellbeing and development.

Learn more about the Imagine If... conference and book today.

Follow this page to see our exciting speaker and workshop announcements – coming shortly.

09.30am: Welcome: Keith Merrin, Director of North East Museums

09.45am: Keynote: Councillor Tracey Dixon, South Tyneside Council

10.10am: Cragside Primary’s Journey: Our journey through the Excellence in Education programme: Rebecca Jackson, Cragside Primary School

10.30am: The Cultural Match Programme - North East Museums: Sarah Hudson and Rachel Adam with Shiremoor Primary School

10.45am: Inclusion - The Difference: Jamie Rogers, The Difference

11.00am: Break

11.30am: Workshops - Inclusion

12.30pm: Lunch

1.30pm: Workshops - Realising Potential

2.30pm: Break

2.50pm: Workshops - Teacher Development and Wellbeing

3.45pm: Upcoming Grants and Opportunities

4pm: Thank you and Close

Our workshops will focus around the themes of inclusion, realising ambition and teacher wellbeing and development.

Please find the workshop titles below, more information coming soon.

Inclusion

• Nurture the North East - Nurture UK
  • Implementing a nurturing approach in schools can significantly enhance both student wellbeing and academic outcomes. This workshop will introduce participants to the Six Principles of Nurture that support the social and emotional development of children and young people. Through practical guidance and reflection, attendees will explore how these principles can help create inclusive, supportive learning environments where every pupil is equipped and ready to learn.
• Festival of Languages - Great North Museum: Hancock and International Newcastle
  • Festival Coordinator Declan Baharini will give an overview of the Festival, it's purpose, reach and impact. She will give an insight into the 2026 programme, which will open for advance registration in mid November, with activities running 6 January to 31 March 2026. Followed by an overview and chance to try activities from Great North Museum: Hancock's Language Treasures Day as part of the festival (links to classics, celebrating language diversity, vocabulary development, English, MFL).
• Inclusive Leadership - The Difference and Percy Main Primary
  • In this one-hour interactive session, Jamie Rogers (Director of Programmes & Partnerships, The Difference) draws on national data, Ofsted’s working definition of inclusion, and lived examples from The Difference’s network to explore what happens when schools act early to prevent exclusion. Participants will examine the four principles of inclusion — built from the universal up, led from the top, rooted in community collaboration, and made measurable — and apply these to their own school contexts.
  • The session will then move from national insight to practical application through the lens of Internal Alternative Provision (IAP) — supportive, in-school interventions for pupils at risk of exclusion, suspension, or persistent absence. Leaders will reflect on how their own internal provision could evolve to: 
    • Strengthen belonging and engagement for vulnerable learners.
    • Reduce reliance on external AP. 
    • Balance academic progress with wellbeing. 
    • Generate measurable, sustainable impact. 
  • Participants will leave with practical tools and reflective questions drawn from The Difference’s Four Building Blocks of Effective IAP, enabling them to benchmark their current approach and plan the next steps towards a truly inclusive school culture.
• Melva - Mortal Fools
  • Making it easier to support children's complex SEMH needs. This session is for teachers interested in practical, structured and proven ways to support children with the ever-growing complexities of SEMH needs presenting in our classrooms and cultivate their lifelong resilience. 
  • The session will include extracts from Mortal Fools' award-winning MELVA DIGITAL programme (used by over 150 North East schools so far), demonstrate the impact of creative experiential learning activities for mental wellbeing and share techniques rooted in social constructivism pedagogy that can be applied in the classroom the very next day.
• Lego® Build the Change - Great North Museum: Hancock
• Sketchy Walks - Hatton Gallery 

Realising Potential

• Voice North East Oracy Programme - Voice 21
  • In this session, you will be introduced to the Voice 21 Oracy Framework. Pupils from Westgate Hill Primary will perform a variety of poems, using their presentational talk skills, which are developed through exploring the Physical Strand of the Oracy Framework and the LAMDA Verse and Prose syllabus. They will share how they use skills such as vocal modulation, body language and clarity of diction to perform in an engaging way. We will also look at practical classroom strategies to help students to build their confidence and fluency whilst reading out loud.

• Fast Forward to Reading Fluency - North East Learning Trust
  
  • Imagine if reading wasn’t a barrier to learning. This session explores the critical role of reading fluency in ensuring a successful transition from primary to secondary school, particularly for pupils who struggle with reading. Drawing on current research and classroom practice, we will examine: 
    • The importance of reading fluency as a bridge between decoding and comprehension. 
    • Challenges faced by struggling readers during the transition phase, including increased cognitive load, subject-specific vocabulary, and reduced scaffolding. 
    • Effective intervention strategies, with a particular focus on targeted support that builds fluency, confidence, and motivation. 
  • A key highlight of the session will be the presentation of our successful intervention programme, Fast Forward to Fluency. We will share insights into its design, implementation, and impact, showcasing how it has supported pupils to make measurable gains in fluency and overall reading confidence. Participants will leave with practical strategies and a deeper understanding of how to support reading development during this pivotal stage, ensuring that no pupil is left behind as they move into secondary education.
• Articulate - Laing Art Gallery
  • Articulate uses art as inspiration for learning strategies to support the development of oracy, communication and literacy skills. This session will explore some of the activities that we use with children to encourage conversation, debate, vocabulary building and collaborative working.
• Supporting Emotional Based School Avoidance - South Shields Museum & Art Gallery
  • This case study will illustrate how South Shields Museum & Art Gallery partnered with an Educational Psychologist to use the museum space and collections to inspire children and young people and their families to use art and co-create an art exhibition, as a way to express what makes school a challenging place for them, to help others understand how they might be able to help. The session will be followed by a guided slow looking session with sensory enhancement and creative response.
• Lego® Build the Change - Great North Museum: Hancock
• Sketchy Walks - Hatton Gallery 

Teacher Wellbeing and Development

• Cultural Trust, Empowering Change - Cragside Primary
  • Team Dynamics and Distributed Leadership: A look at how creativity flourishes when leadership is shared and staff feel empowered to take initiative.
  • Group Discussion: Honest conversations around the challenges and successes of implementing these practices, with space for participants to share their own experiences. 
  •  Well-being Impact: Workshop leaders will share a personal account of how this approach has positively influenced their professional well-being and sense of purpose. 
  •  Curriculum Design for Creativity and Oracy: A deep dive into how making time and space in the curriculum—by stripping back to essential knowledge—can create room for oracy, creativity and authentic learning.
• Linking Leaders - NEAT Academy Trust
  • This interactive workshop introduces Linking Leaders, a research-informed professional learning programme for schools that forms part of the North-East Combined Authority's Excellence in Education offer. In this session, we'll introduce the programme and its core values, delve into how creativity and rigour can work hand-in-hand to shape powerful peer-review relationships and examine the Education Endowment Foundation's implementation cycle to consider the impact of collaborative approaches to school improvement.
• Cultural Match - Excelsior Academy
  • By the end of the session, participants will have been shown how Excelsior Academy and the Theatre Royal Newcastle collaborated in a year-long Cultural Match project. They will have the opportunity to try a group drama activity.
• Cultural Match - Shiremoor Primary
  • A North East song and a dance: enriching Arts education through local heritage and culture. Through our Cultural Match journey, we would like to share how we enriched our Arts curriculum across the whole school. This was based on folk music created in response to our local heritage and industries. There will be an opportunity to learn some local songs, a dance and reflect on how you could use these ideas to benefit your learners.
• Lego® Build the Change - Great North Museum: Hancock
• Sketchy Walks - Hatton Gallery 

Sarah Hudson

Sarah has worked in the cultural sector for over 25 years. Starting off her career in Local Authority departments where she worked in Arts Development and Cultural Services. She then moved to a freelance portfolio career managing cultural work with many organisations directly; Arts Council England, Museums Northumberland, North East Museums, Helix Arts, Novo Theatre and Northumberland County Council and many more in partnership. She has been an Arts Award trainer and advisor and worked with talented creatives nationally and internationally. 

Sarah's work is varied covering fundraising and bid writing, development of strategy and policy, creative producing, supporting practitioners and everything in between! This is the third year that Sarah has been working on the Cultural Match programme for North East Museums and is responsible for working with the early career teachers to develop their programmes within school.

Rachel Adam

Rachel is a mentor and consultant in the cultural sector and has worked on Cultural Match with North East Museums for two years. She leads the peer learning sessions, which enable early career teachers and their in-school mentors to explore the concept of cultural capital, reflect and share learning from their Cultural Match projects and build connections with other schools. 

In her consultancy work with clients regionally and nationally, Rachel draws on rich learning from a variety of roles including Director of Museums Northumberland bait, the Creative People and Places programme in Northumberland; Director of Juice, Newcastle Gateshead’s Festival for Children and Young People; Head of Development at The Glasshouse (formerly Sage Gateshead). She also brings board experience and is Vice-Chair of Queen’s Hall Arts.

Sarah Blakeman

Sarah is a Senior Professional Learning Advisor with seven years of experience supporting leadership development, curriculum progression, and the creative arts.

Prior to this, she was a secondary teacher and Faculty Leader in County Durham. Sarah leads Education Durham’s National Professional Qualifications and coaches middle and senior leaders in the UK and internationally. Sarah designs and delivers CPD for primary, secondary and special schools, working 1-2-1, with small groups and with whole cohorts. She champions peer-review networks to strengthen practice across school communities in the North East. She is a COBIS peer-accreditor and an Associate Education Advisor with the AoEA.

Rebecca Jackson

Rebecca Jackson has served as Headteacher of Cragside Primary School since 2018, bringing over three decades of experience in education. She is a Fellow of both the Chartered College of Teaching and the Royal Society of Arts, and an associate member of the Association of Education Advisers. In 2025, she was honoured with the Inspirational Educator Award by The Educators Trust. Under her leadership, the school received the Platinum ArtsMark in 2024 and in 2025 received the TES Schools Award for ‘Excellence in Creative Arts’. In March 2025 Cragside was rated outstanding in all five areas.

Declan Baharini (pictured on the left)

Chief Executive Officer, International Newcastle and Co-ordinator, Express Yourself: North East Festival of Languages.

Sarah Edgar (pictured on the right)

Education Consultant English as an Additional Language, International links and Modern Foreign Languages. School Effectiveness, Newcastle City Council.

Declan and Sarah have worked closely together for the last 6 years providing support for schools in Newcastle and through the Festival, schools across the North East. 

As CEO of International Newcastle, Declan leads on Our Newcastle Our World, a framework for partnership working and collaboration. She has 35 years of experience in supporting partnership development at local, regional, national and international levels and is responsible for delivering the vision of ‘Newcastle as an international city for our young people as confident, global citizens’, as well as being Festival Co-ordinator.

Sarah gained 30 years of teaching experience before taking up her position with the City Council, where she leads on work with schools around EAL support and Schools of Sanctuary, as well as working closely with Declan on schools’ international links and visits abroad and promoting language teaching, learning and intercultural awareness in schools. 

Together they also develop and deliver the Express Yourself: North East Festival of Languages, which will run for the 6^th time in 2026, providing free activities to schools, community schools and groups around diverse languages and cultures and the North East’s connections to the world. The Festival runs for 3 months from January to March, with advance bookings, the programme and website open in mid-November.  Declan is the Festival Co-ordinator. Sarah works closely with her to deliver the Festival and has been responsible for securing funding to support the Festival, as it grows in popularity and scope, with over 93,000 children and young people involved in 2025. 

Jamie Rogers

In this keynote, Jamie Rogers shares a personal journey into the heart of relational practice how building trust, safety, and connection can strengthen inclusion and transform pupil outcomes. Drawing on insights from The Difference and lived experience in schools, Jamie explores what becomes possible when relationships are treated as the foundation for learning, not an afterthought. 

The session will also feature inspiring school leader Rebecca Godfrey, Assistant headteacher of Percy Main Primary School, whose pioneering work in relational practice will be spotlighted. Together, they'll show how relational approaches are already shaping brighter, more aspirational futures for young people in the North East and beyond.

Kiz Crosbie

Kiz Crosbie is a creative leader and theatre artist, currently the founding Artistic Director & CEO of Mortal Fools, an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation specialising in the applied use of creativity to support children, young people and communities to thrive.

Mortal Fools, based in Ashington, Northumberland, work in locations of low creative provision, supporting community development and boosting people's creative health through programmes of live events / performances and a thriving digital creative programme.

Prior to her work with Mortal Fools, Kiz has had a varied career, training at Royal Central School of Speech & Drama and work including Royal Shakespeare Company, Live Theatre, Creative Partnerships and Northern Stage.

Philippa Wellden

Philippa Wellden is a dedicated primary school teacher with a passion for music and the arts. After graduating with First Class Honours in Primary Education (Mathematics specialism) from the University of Brighton, she returned to the North East to begin her teaching career.

Raised in Northumberland and immersed in its vibrant folk and traditional music scene, Philippa performed as a violinist and vocalist in various school and county ensembles, later also learning piano. These experiences gave her the opportunity to perform across the UK and Europe, deepening her love of music, particularly folk traditions, which she now enjoys sharing with her pupils.

She enjoyed participating in the Cultural Match project as an Early Career Teacher, organising and leading a whole-school, music-based project that enriched both the curriculum and pupils’ cultural capital.

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