Opinion: Policy

Labour can’t be all talk and no action on oracy

1 Nov 2024, 5:00

Given that children in the lowest income group start school with language skills 19 months behind their wealthier peers on average, it’s unsurprising that the oracy commission is calling for oracy to be prioritised as the fourth ‘R’, alongside reading, writing and arithmetic.  

But to make oracy education work at scale, the government must place evidence and impact at the heart of their implementation, drawing insights from the experience of the organisations which have pushed oracy onto the national agenda. 

Despite evidence of its benefits, oracy has suffered from a lack of consensus on what it is, what it means, and how it can be delivered. The work of the commission fills in those gaps, providing a shared definition of oracy, a picture of what good looks like, and a blueprint for how it might be implemented. 

But what does oracy done well look like, and can it be delivered at scale? 

At Impetus, we find, build and fund organisations delivering the best-evidenced interventions to support young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Oracy interventions have been found to add 6 months’ additional academic progress over the course of a year, while pupils with higher language ability are more likely to secure crucial English and maths GCSEs.

This is why for the past five years, we’ve supported national oracy charity, Voice 21. 

Through our partnership, we provided them with long-term, unrestricted funding for sustainable growth, complemented by hands-on, intensive support from our team. With Voice 21, we’ve been there each step of the way: refining their theory of change, helping shape organisational strategy and being a critical friend and partner.  

Voice 21’s Voicing Vocabulary project evaluated the impact of an oracy-rich approach to vocabulary development, tracking students’ progress in reading at 12 schools across England.

At the start of the project, only 19 per cent of students obtained above average reading scores. After implementing oracy interventions, this figure rose to 28 per cent – five points above the national average. 

Government must go beyond a surface-level understanding of what works

After more than 20 years working directly with organisations to increase their impact like this, we know achieving lasting change is not easy. As the government considers how to turn oracy from policy into practice, it should take lessons from the schools and organisations that are already doing it well.  

The first step is establishing what ‘good’ looks like, which provides a framework for broader implementation. Voice 21’s oracy benchmarks are used to accredit their ‘Centres of Excellence’, with 44 schools accredited to date.  

The next step to national roll out is to promote evidence-based approaches to oracy that can be scaled. This is one of the recommendations of the OEC and a key aspect of Voice 21’s expanding public affairs function. 

Of course, what works for one organisation cannot always be replicated perfectly on a national level. 

As one of the founding partners of the National Tutoring Programme, we saw its success undermined by a focus on headline reach rather than headline impact. Reaching as many people as possible is a noble and sensible aim, but we believe the deeper and more meaningful the impact, the better.  

While working with Magic Breakfast from 2015 to 2021 we supported them to secure a government tender for what became the National School Breakfast Programme, supporting breakfast provision in 1770 schools across England. 

That the programme reached some 375,000 children per day is proof that rolling out impactful interventions nationally is possible. But the recent focus only on breakfast neglects the learning support element of the programme which made it such a success.

To implement an intervention well and with impact requires government to go beyond a surface-level understanding of what works.  

Earlier this year, learning from our work with Voice 21, we called on the new government to “build the necessary infrastructure for oracy education for all”. With their blueprint for a national oracy entitlement, the oracy commission has taken the first step. But as we turn to implementation, we would urge the government to learn from our experiences.  

Against the backdrop of a tight fiscal environment, with an autumn statement chock-full of hard decisions aiming to fill a £40 billion ‘fiscal black hole’, oracy feels like a rarity: a low-cost, high-impact intervention with the potential to deliver transformative change for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.  

What remains to be done is ensure it isn’t all talk and no action.  

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