Over the past decade, there has been a welcome resurgence of interest in oracy. Schools have rightly begun to recognise that spoken language is not simply a by-product of learning but a fundamental part of it. Children who are able to explain their thinking, articulate ideas clearly and engage thoughtfully with others are better equipped to participate not only in classrooms but in society more broadly. Few would disagree with that ambition.
What has interested me, however, is not whether oracy matters, but how it develops.
Much of the conversation surrounding oracy understandably focuses on the quality of children’s talk. We discuss questioning, vocabulary, sentence stems, discussion protocols and opportunities for purposeful dialogue. These are all valuable. Yet I sometimes wonder whether, in our enthusiasm to improve children’s spoken communication, we have overlooked something rather more fundamental.
What if confident speech is not the starting point?
What if it is the consequence of something else?
I was reminded of this while watching a group of children during a drama lesson. One pupil, who had barely contributed during the preceding literacy lesson, had been cast as the captain of a ship caught in a violent storm. Within minutes, they were issuing instructions, negotiating with their crew and improvising responses to problems that neither I nor the class had anticipated. The hesitation that had characterised much of the morning had seemingly disappeared. The child who had avoided eye contact during whole-class discussion was now holding the attention of an entire room.
It would have been tempting to conclude that drama had somehow made the child more confident.
I suspect something rather different had happened.
When children step into role, they are not speaking as themselves. The words they choose, the decisions they make and the emotions they express belong, at least temporarily, to somebody else. The fear of saying the wrong thing is softened because there is no single correct answer. Mistakes become part of the unfolding narrative rather than evidence of failure. In role, children often discover a freedom that can feel much harder to access when every contribution is attached to their own identity.
This distinction matters because communication is never simply about language. Before children decide what to say, they are already communicating through posture, gesture, facial expression, movement, proximity and eye contact. They are constantly interpreting the intentions of others while simultaneously making decisions about how visible they wish to become themselves. By the time words are spoken, communication is already well underway.
Drama acknowledges this complexity.
Rather than treating speaking as an isolated skill, it invites children to communicate with their whole body. They learn to inhabit another person’s perspective, respond spontaneously to changing situations and make meaning collectively with others. Language grows naturally from these shared experiences because children have something genuine to communicate rather than simply an expectation that they should speak.
This may help to explain why some children who contribute very little during formal classroom discussion become remarkably articulate in dramatic contexts. It is not that drama has given them words they did not previously possess. Instead, it has altered the conditions under which those words are being spoken. The imagined world offers a degree of psychological safety that the everyday classroom does not always provide. Speaking no longer feels like a performance of the self. It becomes part of sustaining the shared fiction.
For many years, I suspect I misunderstood what I was witnessing in these moments. I believed that drama was helping children to become confident communicators. Increasingly, I have come to think that drama does something both simpler and more profound. It creates environments in which communication feels necessary, meaningful and safe. Confidence is not taught directly. Rather, it emerges almost incidentally as children become absorbed in the world they are creating together.
Perhaps this is why drama has so often occupied an uneasy place within discussions about school improvement. We have tended to justify it by pointing towards its wider benefits: vocabulary development, empathy, teamwork, creativity or confidence. While all of these are undoubtedly valuable, I wonder whether they distract us from something more significant. Drama is not merely a vehicle through which other outcomes are achieved. It is one of the few pedagogical approaches that begins with the fundamentally human act of making meaning together.
If our ambition is to help children become thoughtful, articulate and confident speakers, then oracy undoubtedly deserves its place at the heart of the curriculum. My question is simply whether we have been looking at the journey from the wrong end. Rather than asking children to become accomplished speakers before they feel secure enough to express themselves, perhaps we should first offer them opportunities to imagine, embody, explore and rehearse. In doing so, we may find that the spoken language we value so highly begins to emerge with far greater authenticity.
For that reason, I have come to think that drama does not sit alongside oracy as an optional enrichment activity, nor does it merely support it from the margins. In many respects, it provides the conditions from which meaningful oracy can grow.
Perhaps drama does not follow oracy after all.
Perhaps, for many children, it comes first.
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