There is something slightly uncomfortable about watching an educational idea become a product, and we have all seen it happen to various aspects of pedagogy over the years. The increased prominence of oracy within the curriculum is welcome, and long overdue; for those of us who have spent years thinking about the quality of children’s talk in classrooms, there is much to celebrate in the growing recognition that speaking and listening are not simply pleasant additions to a good education, but fundamental parts of one.
Yet, alongside that recognition, an industry is inevitably growing too. Search for support with oracy and schools will increasingly find programmes, frameworks, resources, training packages and accreditation, and as we move towards the curriculum changes planned for 2028, I suspect that market will grow considerably. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it should give us pause and encourage us to think carefully about what it is we are actually trying to improve.
This isn’t an argument against organisations supporting schools with oracy. Schools benefit enormously from working with organisations with genuine expertise, and good professional development can challenge thinking and give teachers and leaders a shared language through which to improve practice. External expertise can often be the catalyst for significant and lasting change, but there is an important distinction between buying expertise and believing that we can buy oracy.
Oracy is not a scheme of work, nor is it something that happens for forty-five minutes on a Tuesday afternoon before children return to classrooms in which the same confident pupils answer most of the questions. It cannot be reduced to sentence stems laminated beside a whiteboard or demonstrated through the existence of a progression document in a curriculum folder, because ultimately it lives in the thousands of interactions that take place across a school every day.
We see it in the teacher who notices that three children have answered every question and deliberately creates space for somebody else; in the carefully chosen question that requires children to think rather than guess what is in the teacher’s head; and in the partner discussion that has a genuine purpose. We see it, too, in the adult who resists finishing a child’s sentence and in the classroom where changing your mind after listening to somebody else is regarded as intellectual strength rather than failure. None of these things arrives in a box, and that matters particularly because oracy is, at its heart, an issue of equity.
The evidence reinforces this. The Education Endowment Foundation’s review of oral-language approaches finds a high average impact on pupil outcomes and suggests that these approaches can be particularly effective for disadvantaged pupils. The children who most need school to expand their opportunities for language, dialogue and participation cannot afford for high-quality oracy provision to become dependent upon whether their school can purchase the right package.
At a time when budgets are increasingly difficult, we should be cautious about creating another area of education in which schools come to believe that doing something properly requires a subscription. The concern is not that such support exists, but that we begin to mistake purchasing the support for doing the work.
There is another risk, because purchasing a solution can subtly move our attention away from pedagogy and towards implementation. We begin by asking whether teachers are using the resource or following the programme, when the much more interesting questions are about what is actually happening in our classrooms: who is speaking, who is being listened to, whose ideas are being developed and, perhaps most importantly, who remains unheard?
I think that is where a school’s oracy journey should begin. Before buying anything, we should spend time in classrooms and listen, noticing who volunteers answers and who waits to be chosen. We should consider whether children are genuinely discussing ideas or simply taking turns to speak, and ask pupils themselves when they feel confident contributing, when they choose silence and what it is about our classrooms that leads them to make those choices.
From there, we can look carefully at teaching: how well we model language, how deliberately we teach children to listen and whether our questions genuinely invite thought. We can examine whether we have created different ways to participate for children who will never be the first to put their hand up, recognising that silence can mean thinking, uncertainty, anxiety, disengagement or simply a preference not to perform publicly. These conversations cost very little, but they are considerably harder than purchasing a programme because they require us to examine the habits and interactions that make up our own classrooms.
By 2028, schools will undoubtedly be offered countless ways to become “oracy-rich”, many of which will be excellent, and external expertise will continue to have an important place. The challenge for school leaders will be to use that expertise intelligently without outsourcing the thinking that has to happen within their own schools, because no framework can tell us everything about the children sitting in front of us, their context or the quality of the interactions they experience each day.
Our starting point, then, should be relatively simple. We do not need every school to follow the same oracy journey, but we do need every school to take the quality of children’s talk seriously enough to find its own. Ultimately, oracy will not improve because schools have bought more resources about talking; it will improve because, across the thousands of interactions that happen every day, we have become much better at listening.
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