Denise Yates, a long-standing campaigner for children with high learning potential and dual and multiple exceptionality, has been elected as Chair of the Potential Trust, a charity of which she is currently a Trustee.

Yates succeeds Anna Comino-James, who has chaired the Trust since she co-founded it in 1984.

“All of the current trustees are grateful to Anna for decades of service to gifted children and inspiring educators. Through her work at the Potential Trust, Anna has enabled thousands of young people to take part in extracurricular activities that are right for them and to meet like-minded peers. And through the Trust’s Potential Conferences, she has given hundreds of teachers, parents and educational innovators of many stripes a boost of confidence by showing them that they are not alone. I think I speak for all of them if I express my gratitude to Anna for her pioneering work and her remarkable tenacity,” says Yates.

The Potential Trust awards micro-grants to children whose ambitions and capabilities exceed those of their peers, and organises Potential Conferences, billed as “twenty-four-hour coffee breaks with dinner thrown in,” which create dialogue between educators focused on the paths and personalities of the same constituency of children.

Also at their most recent meeting, the Trustees elected Christophe Fricker as Vice Chair of the organisation.

Anna Comino-James has been appointed by the Trustees as Lifelong Questor; she is also a Trustee of the Comino Foundation, an honorary life member of Potential Plus UK, and a Fellow of the RSA. Handing over the baton, she reiterates her “belief in the importance of sharing ideas, experiences, concerns, and possibilities” to support children with high learning potential and educators interested in seeing them thrive.

Denise Yates has worked in education and training for more than forty years with a range of groups, including ex-offenders, children with SEND, young people at risk of offending and those who, for a variety of reasons, struggle in mainstream school. For ten years, she was Chief Executive of Potential Plus UK, formerly The National Association for Gifted Children. She is the co-author, with Adam Boddison, of The School Handbook for Dual and Multiple Exceptionality and the author of Parenting Dual Exceptional Children.

Christophe Fricker is a literary translator and associate professor of German and Translation at the University of Bristol. He is a faculty member of Deutsche Schülerakademie, a German government-run summer school scheme for gifted and talented secondary school pupils.