When the children at The Valley Community School were asked what they would like to be when they grow older, they all had different answers – a hairdresser, a doctor, a builder and so forth. How can we support them with their future hopes and dreams? One of the ways is by building oracy into the curriculum.
As with many children, the ideas that they have about their future jobs and careers will probably change. However, something that will be needed for whatever they choose to do in life is oracy skills. These are the important tools needed to enable them to communicate effectively.
Shining a light on oracy
As Michael Gardner pointed out in his blog, ‘Oracy – An essential in the teacher’s toolkit‘, ‘whilst oracy is a relatively new term bouncing around education right now, it has actually been hiding in plain sight in classrooms across the country’ for a long time. However, with past events and current issues such as the pandemic and the rise in handheld technology, the government and other organisations are now shining a spotlight on oracy, highlighting its importance for the future success of our children.
How The Valley Community School built an oracy skills curriculum
Mo Dawood, a primary teacher at The Valley Community School has kindly shared his school’s oracy journey with us. He discusses why oracy was part of their school development plan and the important factors to consider when consciously building oracy and the related opportunities into your curriculum.
As Mo explains in the video, building oracy into your curriculum, both successfully and with purpose, requires investment from the whole school team. The Valley’s Headteacher Kevan Naughton and their Oracy Lead Fia Arthurson join Mo in the video to share their thoughts and the steps they took when implementing it.
To find out more about The Valley Community School’s oracy journey, why not watch the video below. Alternatively, you may wish to read about it instead by reading the transcript below:
Our oracy journey
Meet Mo. Mo is a teacher at The Valley Community School in Bolton. Part of their focus as a school has been to develop oracy. Here he talks about The Valley Community School’s oracy journey. Over to Mo…
I’m really excited to be sharing our school’s fascinating journey involving oracy over the past couple of years. Let’s start by answering the following question…
What is oracy?
To better understand oracy, we need to know what oracy is and what oracy looks like. In its simplest terms, it’s the ability to communicate effectively. This includes listening, speaking and understanding others. It’s not just about talking.
It’s a fundamental skill that lays the foundations for success in school and beyond. To really push with oracy within your school, you need the backing of your staff and management alike at all levels.
Thoughts from the team at The Valley Community School
Before I go through our school’s journey from a class teacher’s point of view, here are some words from our headteacher, Kevan Naughton.
Headteacher’s thoughts
At the Valley School, oracy is incredibly important for us. Most of our children are EAL learners (English as an additional language) and therefore how they speak, how they listen, how they interact with each other is an essential part of their learning. We invested massively in drama conventions, hot seating, and various other oracy tools around the school that give our children the opportunity to speak, both in groups, individually, and in public and with each other which is really important for collaborative learning.
Kevan Naughton, Headteacher at The Valley Community School
Oracy was one of our school development priorities. Whilst we knew that there were some amazing practice taking place within our school, for example, the weekly teaching of vocabulary, and the incorporation of drama across our whole school curriculum, our oracy subject lead’s role was to develop the wider school approach and to enhance our pupils vocabulary development even further.
Insights from the oracy lead
The Oracy Lead, Fia Arthurson, gives us some insight into how she got started.
One of the first things I did when I took on the role was to audit our current resources and teaching techniques. It was essential to investigate good practice to best support and equip our students and staff. We have used CPD and workshops to create a bespoke oracy curriculum. This follows a child from the age of two right through their journey across The Valley until they leave us at eleven.
Fia Arthurson, Oracy Lead at The Valley Community School
When we were looking at our oracy skills curriculum we made reference to the oracy skills framework and glossary that was devised by Voice 21. There are four elements to this:
- Physical
- Linguistic
- Cognitive
- Social emotional
As a staff, we took the oracy skills framework and glossary from Voice 21 and integrated those skills alongside activities and objectives within our curriculum. This meant that we could see what our coverage was like across school and how it progressed from very early on for our pupils up until when they leave us in Year 6. We also identified gaps in regards to certain aspects of oracy, that we felt our staff and pupils needed further opportunities to practise and work on.
The Valley’s 5 top tips for developing oracy at your school:
- Set out a clear and precise vision. Make sure that staff at all levels are part of the journey of developing oracy in school.
- Know and understand the oracy framework document, alongside its respective benchmarks. This document has been produced by Voice 21, alongside Oracy Cambridge. It really breaks down the nitty gritty of the different strands of oracy development.
- Look at your whole school curriculum and identify where oracy practice is already taking place. Highlight, praise and celebrate current good practice before identifying any further areas of development that your staff may need to work on alongside your pupils. Make sure you factor in CPD that may be required to support this further.
- Consider the learning environments. By this I include resources as well as the approach taken as part of teaching strategies. Are your pupils given enough opportunities to work collaboratively? Are they given enough opportunities to reflect and present? Do the pupils have a breadth of opportunities to discuss and debate?
- Consider the physical resourcing that you have within school. We all know that within every school, within every class, there is always a group of pupils who struggle with the development of their oracy, in particular, speaking, listening and communicating.
As part of a future series of video’s, Mo is going to share and highlight some TTS resources that will support the development of oracy within schools so keep and eye out for these.
Further reading
If you are interested in reading other blogs about oracy and would like to find out more, then why not click on the link below to take a look at some of our other blogs written by Michael Gardner, Sal McKeown and other teachers and practitioners from a range of nurseries and settings. Click here for further blog posts on oracy.
Explore resources to support oracy
Many thanks to Mo Dawood, the staff and children at The Valley Community School for sharing this blog and video with us.