Headteachers, Deputy Headteachers, Pupil Premium leads, SEND co-ordinators and Governors from across the membership attended the 2019 NW24 Annual Conference, which took place on Wednesday, May 1st, at the sunny and bright Bristol Pavilion.This year's theme, “Addressing the disadvantage gap” followed our successful bid for funding from the Local Authority in October 2018, to initiate a project to investigate and reduce the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers. Working with Inclusion Expert, the NW24 Gap Project commenced in January 2019. With significant investigations within 4 pilot schools completed, we were ready to share the opening results and opportunities with our membership. Keynote speaker and Gap Project consultant, Daniel Sobel (founder of and lead consultant for Inclusion Expert), opened the conference and our own Gap Project Leaders presented findings from their audits and details of the reviews thus far. Our Gap Project Leaders then lead group workshops to explore their key themes as well as share, discuss and debate identified strengths and opportunities within their schools. Key messages emanating from our conference were; focus on a small sample - don’t try and fix it all for everyone, work with your best and most enthusiastic staff and let them generate the energy; disadvantaged children including pupil premium benefit from your investment in upskilling your workforce, then personalise the solutions and match the success criteria to the objective. Daniel Sobel endorsed the power of the NW24 network, and inspired our school leaders and governors to challenge unnecessary bureaucracy and believe in their own expertise.