What is oracy?
Oracy is the ability to articulate ideas, develop understanding and engage with others through spoken language.
Barlow Hall’s Vision for Oracy:
We believe all children should be taught to use their voice to communicate with confidence to maximise their chances for success in life now and in their future. Our children know their voices are valued and understand the power of being heard and listened to. They value and respect other voices around them.
Our Rationale
Oracy is learning to talk and learning through talk. It is fundamental to the teaching of English and is a golden thread through our whole curriculum. We want our children to develop effective communication skills for the here and now and also in readiness for later life. Barlow Hall is a Voice 21 school. Voice 21 is a national charity that exists to enable teachers and schools to provide a high quality oracy education. Through our continued work with Voice 21, we are committed to building and embedding a culture of oracy within our school.
We will ensure that teachers and senior leaders are equipped with the skills to develop oracy for teaching and learning, to plan for talk across the curriculum and to elevate speaking beyond the classroom. By building a culture of oracy within our school, we want to develop our children’s confidence, spoken language and written outcomes across and beyond the curriculum.
Research shows that oracy improves academic outcomes, developing learners who can think critically, reason together and have the vocabulary to express their emotions, knowledge and understanding (EEF, 2021). Oracy fosters wellbeing, supporting pupils to build successful relationships, talk through issues, express feelings and resolve conflicts (The Communication Trust, 2017).
At Barlow Hall, we aim to promote social equity through oracy, leading to a fairer society where everyone, regardless of their background, finds their voice for success in school and life.
Our Implementation
At Barlow Hall, we use the Voice 21 Oracy Framework which breaks down the teaching of speaking and listening into four strands:
- Physical
- Cognitive
- Linguistic
- Social and Emotional
These strands are developed further in our Oracy End Points document, which demonstrates theexpectations of skills in each year group and shows the progression of skills through each of thesestrands as a pupil moves through the school.
From EYFS to Year 6, children are given opportunities to develop oracy skills and build their confidence in talk for formal and informal situations, both in and outside the classroom. We have developed classrooms that are rich in talk. In each classroom, discussion guidelines are used to explicitly teach oracy activities. Oracy activities are planned for in lessons across the curriculum. Talk tactics, sentence stems and scaffolds are used to support pupils to develop and practice the skills
they are learning.
At Barlow Hall we:
- Set high expectations for oracy. We share our expectations through discussion guidelines, model talk and provide scaffolding.
- Value every voice. We embed routines for oracy across the curriculum and school, ensure our pupils feel their voice is valued and listened to and plan groupings to support this.
- Teach oracy explicitly. We talk about talk and explicitly teach the skills needed for this talk.
- Use oracy to elevate learning. Talk tactics are used in classrooms. Opportunities and tasks are carefully planned to hook pupils and spark dialogue. Vocabulary is a key part of every lesson.
- Appraise progress in oracy. We praise talk, provide feedback and prompt reflection.
