Six months ago, I was asked by the charity Voice 21 to convene and chair an independent commission on the future of oracy in education in England. I hesitated.
As a grizzled former English teacher, oracy had become fundamental to my own repertoire in class, and I’d experienced the way various activities beyond the classroom (like drama productions, debates and public speaking) enhanced the confidence of so many students.
But all of those years in the classroom and in leadership had also shown me that ‘oracy’ was a slippery term.
Still today, it is often met with hesitation, stemming from uncertainty about what the term actually means. Some consider it simply a ‘nice to have’, and one former schools minister dismissed it entirely as ‘idle chatter in the classroom’.
But then I realised that it was once the same with ‘literacy’. This term appears to have emerged in the late nineteenth century with the beginning of formal state education – in response to the much earlier (seventeenth-century) term ‘illiteracy’.
And with numeracy too, which appeared on the collective radar in the late 1950s, no doubt to some bafflement and scepticism.
Yet both are now inarguable parts of what we want every child to learn.
The challenge, then, was to do the same for oracy. To that end, in April 2024, we assembled a formidable and diverse group of commissioners from schools, trusts, employers, the arts and mental health support.
We started with three simple questions: What is oracy? Why does it matter? And why now?
Then, instead of waiting on a final written report, we launched our ‘Commission Conversations’ – short podcast interviews designed to explore different perspectives on oracy.
This is a report rooted in optimism
There are now more than fifty of these podcasts, each around twenty minutes long. Alongside our five commission meetings, roundtables with expert groups, and some illuminating think-pieces by oracy specialists (see the Schools Week collection here), it was these conversations that helped me demystify oracy the most.
A key issue throughout has been to ensure our understanding of oracy doesn’t start from a deficit model. It can’t be the case that some young people from some communities think that we are denigrating their home language.
Done well, oracy is about empowerment, not limitation, of young people. Rhetoric, after all, can wrest social change from those in power.
Which brings us to our report. Over these past bewildering years, Covid has shone a bleak spotlight on the educational experience of too many young people. Our education system too often feels narrow and mechanistic, driven by crude accountability rather than an optimistic vision of what we want for them.
But as the great sociologist Neil Postman said: ‘Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see’. And this is the starting point of the Oracy Commission’s recommendations.
Reading, writing and arithmetic are recognised by all as the foundations of children’s future learning. They are deemed ‘the three ‘Rs’.
Based on all of our evidence, and against a backdrop of artificial intelligence and an increasingly fragmented society, we argue that it’s time to make oracy ‘the fourth R’.
Learning to talk, listen and communicate, learning through talk and learning about talk should be every child’s entitlement. Oracy should help them to learn and articulate what they have learned, to analyse, explain and justify, to listen critically and to disagree agreeably.
Our final report argues that oracy should therefore show up more explicitly in the national curriculum and in teacher training.
But for this report to be on the side of young people, it must be on the side of their teachers too. So we aren’t reaching for the easy levers of Ofsted inspecting oracy (they couldn’t) or more high-stakes exams at 16 (there are too many already).
Instead, our recommendations are grounded in helping to prepare young people to take their place as flourishing, fulfilled citizens.
In other words, it’s a report rooted in optimism: about recalibrating our education system and about the extraordinary capacity of educators to prepare our children and young people for a time we shall not see.
