High Quality Interactions

High Quality Interactions at St Helen’s
Developing Children's Language and Attention Through High-Quality Interactions

At St Helen’s Catholic Primary School, we recognise that high-quality adult-child interactions are fundamental to developing children's communication, language and vocabulary. We understand that language provides the foundations for children's thinking, learning and future literacy development. Consequently, we place significant emphasis on ensuring that purposeful, meaningful interactions underpin our approach to teaching and learning, both within the classroom and throughout continuous provision.
In 2023-24, St Helen’s joined the Early Years Conversation Research Project, which supported staff in developing their understanding of the Education Endowment Foundation's (EEF) evidence-informed ShREC approach. ShREC provides a practical framework for developing high-quality interactions through four key strategies:
Share attention: Staff tune into children's interests, get alongside them and share their focus, creating meaningful opportunities for communication and engagement.
Respond: Staff are attentive and responsive to children's verbal and non-verbal communication, following their lead, acknowledging their contributions and responding sensitively to their individual needs.
Expand: Staff build upon children's language by repeating, modelling and extending their contributions, introducing new vocabulary and more complex language structures to develop their expressive language.
Conversation: Staff facilitate sustained, meaningful back-and-forth conversations, giving children time to process, respond and articulate their thinking. Carefully considered open-ended questions and prompts encourage children to elaborate, explain and develop their ideas.

Following our involvement in the project, the learning was disseminated to establish a consistent understanding of what constitutes high-quality interactions and how these can be embedded into everyday practice.
The implementation of ShREC has been instrumental in developing staff knowledge, confidence and expertise, particularly in their ability to respond purposefully to children and carefully consider the language and questioning they use. Staff have developed a greater awareness of the importance of commenting more and questioning less, allowing conversations to develop naturally rather than relying on a series of adult-led questions. Where questions are used, these are increasingly purposeful, carefully pitched and designed to extend children's thinking and encourage more developed responses.
Our approach reflects the EEF's emphasis on the quality of adult-child interactions rather than simply the quantity of language children hear. Through sustained professional development, staff modelling, responsive interactions and opportunities for meaningful conversation, we aim to ensure that every child is immersed in a language-rich environment where vocabulary is developed, communication is valued and children's confidence to express themselves continually grows.

This is not an isolated approach or a discrete language intervention; it is an integral part of our pedagogy and our commitment to ensuring that all children develop the communication and language skills they need to thrive.

At St Helen's ShREC is not simply about encouraging adults to talk more with children. It is about improving the quality of interactions so that children become active participants in meaningful conversations, hear increasingly rich language and are supported to develop their own vocabulary, expression and thinking.