Vision
At St Mary’s Primary School, we are working hard to provide a high-quality oracy education. With oracy at the heart of our curriculum, we are committed to building and embedding a culture of oracy. Purposeful talk is used to drive forward learning, through talk in the classroom, which has been planned, designed, modelled, scaffolded and structured to enable all learners to develop the skills needed to talk effectively and with confidence.
The deliberate, explicit and systematic teaching of oracy across phases and throughout the curriculum will support children to make progress. We want every child at St Mary’s to find their voice. Oracy develops pupils’ confidence, articulacy and capacity to learn.
Providing a high-quality oracy education empowers students, regardless of their background, to find their voice for success in school and in life. Effective communication skills are needed for students to succeed in later life.
What is Oracy?
‘Oracy is the ability to articulate ideas, develop understanding and engage with other through spoken language. Oracy develops students’ confidence, articulacy and capacity to learn’ – Voice 21.
Oracy education is the direct, explicit teaching of speaking and listening skills as part of the language and literacy curriculum., comparable to the direct, explicit teaching of algebra as part of maths.
There are many ways in which Oracy can be used to support our children:
- Engaging with others ideas
- Reasoning together
- Listening to understand
- Changing people’s minds
- Telling compelling stories
- Developing arguments
- Expressing yourself
- Speaking up for what you believe in
Why Oracy?
Improving pupil’s experience in lessons
- We want to support pupils to articulate their ideas with confidence
- We want to encourage more paired talk and discussion
- We want to ensure that talk in lessons is purposeful and supports learning
Improving attainment
- Modelling high-quality oracy supports pupils in their reading and writing
- Talking through ideas will help pupils’ application of knowledge
- Paired talk and high-quality questioning allows teachers to assess understanding and respond to needs
Creating an environment where all pupils can learn
- Modelling high quality oracy supports our pupils with SEND as part of our high-quality teaching
- We need to balance this with silent work and ensure a calm and purposeful environment for all pupils is maintained.
How we teach this
| Pupils need to be able to | What this looks like in lessons | What this should not look like |
|---|---|---|
| Articulate their ideas with confidence. | Pupils given appropriate opportunities to share their ideas. | Long tasks where pupils are left to chat without purpose. |
| Give full and detailed answers which enable them to explain their thinking. | Teachers encouraging full answers and helping pupils extend their answers by asking ‘how?’ or ‘why?’ | Teachers giving the answer too quickly and not encouraging pupils to think. Teachers accepting low quality responses without supporting pupils to improve their answers. |
| Use paired talk to support their answers and given an opportunity for pupils to talk through their ideas. | Paired talk set up with clear timings, questions/tasks and framework/models/scaffolds for discussion including some additional modelling by teacher where appropriate. | Paired talk not set up with a clear framework, question or short task. Lack of modelling or scaffolding. |