The Big Oracy Debate: Oracy Is Coming. Are We Ready to Teach It?

In October, the Education Secretary confirmed that oracy will have equal status with reading and writing in the new national curriculum, taught from 2028 and assessed through to GCSE. For anyone who has championed talk in the classroom, this is a landmark. For headteachers, it’s also the start of some difficult planning, because the announcement leaves several important questions open.

• What exactly are we being asked to teach? There’s no official definition of oracy yet, and the national framework the government has promised hasn’t been published. Schools that wait for it will have less time to prepare; schools that move early risk building on the wrong foundations.
• What makes room for it? Every leader knows the timetable is already full. Giving oracy equal status means something else has to give, and those decisions will land on heads.
• How do we build staff expertise? Most teachers were never trained to teach talk. Leaders will need professional development that changes classroom practice, and a way of seeing whether it’s working beyond a box ticked on a CPD log.
• How do we make sure it works for every pupil? Reluctant speakers, pupils with SEND and multilingual learners stand to gain the most from strong oracy teaching, and to lose the most if it’s done badly.
• Whose voice counts? Is oracy about helping every child think and communicate out loud, or about correcting how some children speak? These are very different agendas, and schools will need to be clear about which one they’re pursuing.
• Can it be assessed fairly? Speaking and listening was removed from the GCSE grade in 2013 because it couldn’t be assessed reliably. What will be different this time?

A debate, not a webinar

Our panellists have spent years on these questions from very different places: the classroom, the research, the policy table. Join them as they bring those perspectives together to discuss whether we are ready to teach oracy, and if not, what it would take to get there.

• Tom Sherrington, author, former headteacher and co-creator of Teaching WalkThrus. He has argued for talk in every lesson for years and wrote last month that rushing speaking and listening back into GCSE English would hold the oracy agenda back.
• Amanda Moorghen, Director of Research and Impact at Voice 21, the national oracy education charity. She leads Voice 21’s work on whether and how oracy can be reliably assessed.
• Professor Julia Snell, Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of Leeds, whose research on dialogic teaching, dialect and social class asks whose talk gets valued in the classroom, and who has argued publicly that correcting non-standard speech may do more harm than good.
• Dr Jim Rogers, People Project Lead at The Mercian Trust and co-founder of The Great Oracy Toolkit, which has delivered oracy programmes across several multi-academy trusts. His interest in oracy began teaching in secondary schools in areas of high deprivation.
• Zoe Enser, School Improvement Lead at The Education Partnership Trust, former HMI and Ofsted’s national lead for secondary English and drama, and co-author of The CPD Curriculum and Generative Learning in Action. She has been asking the question that most needs asking: can we define oracy before we implement it?
• Matt Perry, Headteacher of The Halifax Academy, an all-through school in Calderdale and a Voice 21 Oracy Centre of Excellence with oracy mapped from Reception to Year 11. He brings a school’s own experience of embedding talk across the curriculum: what works, and where the challenges lie.

Hosted by Andy Newell, founder and Managing Director of IRIS Connect.

Your vote shapes the conversation

This is a big debate not only because it’s big questions discussed by our fantastic panel but because you, our audience, will actively shape the conversation too. Each of the conversations opens with a question to you. Your answer goes on screen and the panel responds to it. You can also put your own questions to the panel throughout.

Who should attend

CPD leads, heads, deputies, and anyone accountable for professional learning in a school or trust. The policy context is England, but the questions apply wherever oracy is entering the curriculum and everyone who is interested in the topic is welcome to join.

What you will leave with

A clearer view of what the next 18 months should look like in your school, the strongest arguments from the different angles, and the recording plus a summary of what the room thinks sent to your inbox the following week.