Research has demonstrated that teachers who know more about the literate lives of their students outside of the classroom are more able to set up positive connections between home and school. In this article, we theorise the notion of ‘deficit’ discourses in education. Using two cases as examples, we seek to disrupt deficit discourses about children in communities of high poverty. The first case describes children’s responses when asked to draw and talk about learning to write, and highlights children’s explication of the role of the family in literacy learning. The second case describes an outside school media space where children engaged over time with a variety of new media and digital texts. These examples make the point that listening to young people can provide surprising insights into children’s aspirations and their understandings of the affordances of learning literacy. Our findings challenge the assumptions that underpin deficit understandings of children and young people growing up in communities of high poverty, and suggest that listening to children and young people in schools may well support the goal of providing quality schooling for all students.