Stephen Mitchell

There are some phrases that become so embedded within classroom life that we stop noticing we are saying them. “Eyes this way.” “Pens down.” “Show me you’re listening.” Alongside these sits another familiar instruction that has echoed through classrooms, assemblies and school halls for generations: “Speak up.”

I have said it countless times myself. During class assemblies, while listening to children read aloud, in rehearsals for performances and in those everyday moments when a child begins to answer a question so quietly that only the front row can hear them. The instruction is almost always well intentioned. We want children to be heard, to communicate clearly and to develop the confidence to express their ideas. It seems entirely reasonable to assume that if a child is speaking quietly, the solution is simply to encourage them to speak more loudly.

The more time I have spent working with children, however, the less convinced I have become that the instruction itself achieves what we hope it will.

I am reminded of a pupil I taught several years ago who would read with remarkable fluency. She understood punctuation instinctively, paused thoughtfully at the end of sentences and brought warmth and expression to the characters she encountered in books. Yet every time she read aloud, her voice barely travelled beyond the first few tables. Unsurprisingly, I found myself repeating the familiar prompt. “A little louder, please.” She would glance up, nod politely and raise her voice for a sentence or two before, almost without noticing, returning to exactly the same volume she had been using moments before.

At the time, I assumed she simply needed reminding. Looking back, I suspect I had misunderstood what was happening entirely.

Children rarely struggle to produce volume in every aspect of their lives. The same child who speaks quietly during guided reading may be heard from the opposite end of the playground when explaining the rules of a game. Another may barely contribute during a whole-class discussion yet spend an entire lunchtime enthusiastically negotiating teams for football or recounting every detail of their favourite television programme. Their voice has not suddenly become louder because they have remembered how to project it. Rather, the context has changed, and with it the way they experience communication.

This is perhaps the difficulty with the instruction to “speak up”. It assumes that speaking quietly is primarily a mechanical problem, when in reality it is often an emotional one.

As adults, we recognise this instinctively in ourselves. Most of us can think of occasions when our voice has become noticeably quieter despite every intention to speak clearly. Delivering a presentation to unfamiliar colleagues, addressing a large audience or contributing to a discussion in which we feel uncertain can all produce the same response. Our breathing becomes shallower, our muscles tighten and our voice changes almost without our permission. We would not conclude that we had forgotten how to speak. We would simply recognise that we were experiencing a situation that felt exposing.

Children are no different.

When we ask a child to speak louder, we may imagine that we are commenting only on the volume of their voice. The child, however, may hear something rather different. They may hear that everybody has noticed them. They may feel that they are already failing before they have finished speaking. They may become even more aware of themselves, and in doing so find that the very thing they are trying to change becomes even harder to control. It is one of those curious moments in teaching where the more attention we draw to a difficulty, the more firmly that difficulty can become established.

None of this is to suggest that children should never be encouraged to project their voice. Clear communication matters enormously, and there are many situations in which children need explicit teaching about how to use their voice effectively. The point, however, is that vocal projection cannot be separated from the conditions in which it takes place. A child who feels psychologically safe, who has had time to gather their thoughts and who believes that mistakes are simply part of learning is far more likely to speak with confidence than a child who feels as though every contribution is being judged.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons that drama has such a powerful role to play in education. Actors do not become confident performers because a director repeatedly tells them to speak louder. They rehearse. They experiment. They inhabit characters. They make mistakes in spaces where those mistakes are expected and even welcomed. Over time, what once felt unfamiliar becomes natural because the body has experienced it often enough for the anxiety to diminish. Confidence emerges not through repeated instruction, but through repeated experience.

I sometimes wonder whether classrooms would feel different if we thought about communication in the same way. Instead of asking children to perform immediately, we might give them opportunities to rehearse an idea with a partner, to test out their thinking through role, or simply to sit with a question before being expected to answer it publicly. None of these approaches guarantee that every child will become an enthusiastic contributor overnight, but they acknowledge something important: speaking is not simply an act of producing sound. It is an act of making oneself visible to others, and that carries a degree of vulnerability for many children.

I still catch myself saying, “Speak up.” Old habits have a way of returning when a classroom is busy and time is short. Increasingly, though, those words prompt a different question in my own mind. Rather than wondering why a child is speaking so quietly, I find myself wondering what it is about this particular moment that makes speaking feel difficult.

The answer is rarely found in the child’s voice alone.