Best Practice

Embedding oracy education into the curriculum and the primary school

Oracy education
Bridgewater School has made oracy education a priority across the curriculum and the whole school. Headteacher Sam Robson explains their journey so far
Image: Adobe Stock - Adobe Stock

Good literacy is the gateway to developing children’s ability in all areas of learning and making oracy a priority will not only help pupils’ knowledge intake but will support their social development across early years and primary education.

And let’s not forget that being a good communicator leads to better career prospects too – how we support our children today in our primary school classrooms will affect their futures.

Bridgewater School is situated in the inner west of Newcastle, an area of significant deprivation. With the North East having the highest rate of child poverty in the UK (38%) and with pupils in the North of Tyne likely to underperform in comparison to other areas of the country, a significant proportion of children arrive at our school below their age-related expectation in language and communication.

To combat this, a lot of resources continue to be directed towards developing children’s literacy skills – skills that include listening, developing vocabulary, reading, writing, spelling, and the often-overlooked oracy.

We are at an early stage in our journey to put oracy skills at the heart of our school and curriculum, but we have already seen some really positive changes.

 

How our oracy journey began

Following the impact of Covid-19, it became clear that introducing a focus on oracy in our school would help to build more confidence with social interactions and with literacy.

We were fortunate to work with the North of Tyne Combined Authority (NTCA), which has been able to provide its expertise as well as much-needed funding through the Inspire education grant.

The NTCA connected us with Linking Leaders, a peer evaluation research project for senior leadership teams in schools. This enabled us to review our curriculum and map-out exactly what we needed our it to do.

Through this work we agreed that we wanted to develop oracy and our social curriculum. We wanted to support children to play and work together well, for pupils to be able to self-regulate and work with others and develop their vocabulary and oracy skills so they can negotiate, listen, enquire, and reason with other pupils in and outside of school.

We connected with Voice 21 and Launchpad for Literacy, organisations which offer a range of support and resources for schools, and which have helped support our journey. However, many of the lessons we have learnt over the past year or so revolve around simple, practical changes – all with the commitment to embed oracy into the culture of our school at their heart.

 

Practical changes

Embedding oracy within school culture and into teaching and learning is not an easy or overnight task, but by introducing simple practical changes we are making great progress with our pupils.

We use an oracy framework meaning that throughout the week our lessons reinforce these skills. The framework from Voice 21 has four key strands (see further information for a more detailed break-down)

  • Physical: Your body language, gestures, eye-contact, facial expressions, and how you vary the tone, pitch, pace, and volume of your voice.
  • Linguistic: Relates to the words we choose and how we bring these together through speech.
  • Cognitive: Thought processes that underpin speaking and listening.
  • Social/emotional: Relates to our confidence and interactions with others: how we conduct ourselves within a group, present ourselves to an audience, and listen effectively to others.

By sustaining this work we hope that oracy will become a cornerstone of our school, something that is considered as important as reading and writing.

One particular effective change has been the introduction of discussion guidelines in our classes. These pre-agreed guidelines help not only structure our “talk sessions” but teach our pupils to respect each other’s voices and opinions.

We also practise “talk tactics”, which include teaching our pupils how to politely disagree, how to build on someone else’s point, and how to summarise concisely. We encourage this with the use of sentence stems to help scaffold, suggest and support practice talks or discussions, either for general conversation or tailored to a specific subject.

Resources relating to talk tactics and talk guidelines are available from Voice 21. For more information you can also see a recent best practice article from Voice 21 for SecEd, Headteacher Update’s sister magazine (SecEd, 2023).

These practical steps go beyond the classroom too – we have introduced talking activities into our breakfast and lunchtime clubs to ensure that opportunities to practise oracy are constantly on offer to pupils. We focus on embedding oracy skills during play times and outside learning too.

By making these habits and structures a normal part of the school week, we are able to encourage discussion and conversation and help pupils to challenge each other in a respectful and clear way.

 

Training and CPD

We have put a lot of focus into staff training in this area too – from all-staff training days to collaborating with other schools and utilising specific tools and practices from Voice 21 and others.

Our teachers’ confidence in supporting oracy has greatly improved. By having oracy benchmarks ranging from “teach oracy explicitly” and “have high expectations” to simply “value everyone’s voice” ingrained in our practice, it has helped make oracy part of our teaching DNA (see further information for a link to Voice 21’s oracy benchmarks resource).

 

The impact on our pupils

We are already seeing a real impact both across and beyond the school. For example, pupils’ confidence has grown and they are excited to take part in trust-wide opportunities to speak publicly.

Our pupils have spoken at Trust Council meetings, social justice projects, and in our annual debating competition held in the council chambers at Newcastle Civic Centre.

The experience of these competitions and public speaking opportunities has given the children an exciting way to present their oracy skills; to be proud and confident in their ability to communicate.

We have also seen the impact on the day-to-day too. Children are using a wider range of vocabulary and stem sentences in the playground, in our classrooms, and – from what our parents and carers tell us – at home.

What really put a smile on my face was when colleagues visiting us from another primary school commended us on our children’s vocabulary. It was a heart-warming moment.

All of the staff across our school have loved seeing the positive impact on our pupils and the way they now interact, learn, and grow together.

Our focus on oracy and the journey it has taken our school on has been a brilliant learning curve and as we continue this work we are excited to see where it takes us and our pupils next.

  • Sam Robson is the headteacher of Bridgewater School in Newcastle, part of the West End Schools’ Trust (WEST), a foundation trust of nine primary schools in the west of the city of Newcastle upon Tyne. Visit www.bridgewater.newcastle.sch.uk

 

Further information & resources