One year on from convening the Oracy Commission, where do we go next in helping oracy education to have a wider impact for all children from all backgrounds?
Last October, the commission’s report – We Need to Talk – was generally well received. It made the case that oracy is important for children and young people in the quest for social justice, an essential part of teachers’ professional repertoire, and vital to our civic society.
Then, just a few weeks ago, the interim report from the curriculum and assessment review was published. It too received a range of notably welcoming comments, but its failure to mention oracy – a central plank in the government’s education agenda – raised a few eyebrows.
Some exhorted me to summon up the ghost of old ranty Geoff and clamber onto the barricades. Instead, I had a reassuring conversation with Becky Francis. She’s better placed than most to grasp the weight of high-quality research behind oracy, and this was, after all, an interim report.
But now the tougher work of the review group begins, so here’s what I think they need to do to get oracy right across the curriculum.
Bring back the arts
First, it’s heartening that the interim report places such emphasis on the arts. In doing so, it tacitly acknowledges that a government concerned with social justice must ensure the entitlement to these most human and humane of subjects for every child from every background.
Oracy must become intrinsic in every subject, but if there is one are where talk is integral to the disciplinary process, it is surely here.
It is difficult and costly to deliver high-quality arts teaching, especially as expertise is being lost from the state sector. But the review group must hold its nerve. The arts must be brought back from the curricular margins, and the EBacc measure that consigned them there needs to be scrapped.
A means, not just an end
Second, the Francis review needs to learn lessons from the current national curriculum. Oracy appears there more than most realise. However, it’s chiefly included in the aims of each subject and not in the granular outline of the subject knowledge to be learned.
But the aims are not where you look if you’re writing a scheme of work for Year 9 geography. If we want young people to be able to have thoughtful debates or conversations about, say, climate change, then it’s in their geography and science lessons that the skills of speaking and listening about it should appear.
To say this adds content to the curriculum misses the point. Building young people’s agency around subject knowledge through oracy will help them to learn more powerfully and more deeply. In turn, this can only make teaching more rewarding.
For them, their teachers and for policymakers, this is a win/win/win reason to drive ‘disciplinary oracy’ into subjects.
Talk for democracy
Third, the curriculum review needs to pay attention to citizenship.
For young people to take their place in our democracy, they need to practice arguing their case based on evidence and learn to be discerning, critical listeners.
This matters particularly because they are soon likely to be granted the right to vote at the age of sixteen.
Assessment matters
And finally – and most boldly – if the curriculum review group accepts our argument that oracy is the fourth ‘R’ (as foundational as reading, writing and arithmetic), then like the other three, we must track young people’s progress through low-stakes and high-stakes assessment.
Currently, we don’t assess a child’s speaking ability and capacity to listen at all beyond the age of five. Low-stakes assessment at, say, the age of 12, could provide vital feedback on speech and language skills at a key transition point and trigger extra support.
More than that, in this age of the robots, it would signal to everyone that children’s oracy matters more than ever.
It’s impossible for a curriculum to please all the people all the time. But oracy provides a genuine opportunity to restore joy and agency to the classroom – and that will surely, at least, please all the people most of the time.
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