More Than Just Talk: Embedding oracy with intent and impact

Reflections on two years of whole-college professional development

Two years ago, our college set out to make student oracy one of our core strategic objectives. The reasons were compelling. Research from the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) and Voice 21 consistently highlights the power of oracy to influence academic attainment, emotional wellbeing, and life chances (EEF, 2021; Voice 21, 2024). In a post-pandemic landscape, many learners are still recovering from disrupted language and literacy development.

Two landmark reports published in 2024 have helped raise the profile of oracy in education. The English-Speaking Union’s Why Oracy Matters (2024)  and We Need to Talk (Independent Commission, 2024) have both called for systemic changes, including embedding oracy across the curriculum and elevating it to the same level as reading, writing and arithmetic. Now, more than ever, educators are uniquely positioned to address these deficits and embed oracy as a central part of teaching and learning.

Yet, knowing what to do is not the same as knowing how to do it.

From strategy to implementation: a learning curve

We were very aware of the fact that teachers, pastoral staff and student support staff were already balancing multiple and, at times, competing commitments and time pressures.  To implement meaningful change any professional development programme had to be well‑designed and implemented so that the investment of time and energy was justified. Over the past two years, we have set about building a whole-college approach to developing oracy that is embedded, self-sustaining, and evidence-informed.

Drawing upon the guidance of the EEF in their 2021 report, Effective Professional Development, we began by clearly articulating the rationale for our focus on oracy. We launched the initiative with an external speaker, Rachel Higginson, whose powerful message helped inspire staff by drawing important connections between oracy, student confidence, identity, and self-worth. Staff took away from this a renewed passion for the importance and power of oracy for their students. However, it was also apparent that many also needed some practical strategies to embed oracy in everyday practice.

In response, we introduced two key initiatives. The first was Oracy Focus Week. Staff were given evidence-informed strategy cards to spark discussion within offices and were encouraged to trial at least one new oracy technique in their classrooms or tutor bases. Strategies included, amongst others:

• Think, Pair, Share
• Say It Again, Better
• Talking Tennis
• Talk for Writing
• A-B-C Strategy (Answer, Build, Challenge)
• Scaffolded Group Discussions

Those confident in their practice recorded short videos, later shared in CPD sessions. This peer-led element helped normalise experimentation, creating a safe space for professional learning.

Our second initiative was the Oracy Summer Challenge, where staff were placed into cross-departmental triads to observe each other using oracy strategies with students. They followed this with guided reflective discussions, creating a bank of recorded PD podcasts featuring those staff who were happy to do this. This helped strengthen collaboration and highlighted the importance of implementation fidelity (EEF, 2021). These steps moved us in the right direction, but they also exposed key implementation tensions: engagement was uneven, not all staff felt equally confident in their approach to oracy, and not all students were equally receptive.

From oracy opportunities to oracy for learning

In the second year, our focus shifted from increasing opportunities for oracy to deepening its role as a vehicle for learning. Using the Oracy Skills Framework (Voice 21, 2024), staff across teaching, pastoral, and support teams reflected upon how confident and skilled they felt in their own oracy practice and what areas they would most like to develop. They decided upon the strategy they wished to focus on, whether that was cognitive, social and emotional, physical, or linguistic. The key idea here was that this should align with their existing priorities and targets. Oracy should underpin practice, rather than be additional. 

To enable us to evaluate the impact in some way, we introduced student self-evaluation questionnaires at the start of the academic year, which were carried out during tutorials for all year groups, to gather baseline data on students' perceptions of their confidence and understanding of oracy for learning. Whilst we are aware that student confidence doesn't always correlate with competence, the end of year surveys showed an increase in confidence across all groups, and most significantly amongst female students studying at Level 2 - who had originally been much less confident than their peers at the start of the year. Survey results indicated that there had been a positive shift in student confidence around oracy and progress scores have continued to rise across the college (now at Alps 2 across subjects).

As part of our ongoing practitioner-led action research, which forms a core part of our professional development provision, several teams chose to focus their own research upon student oracy to develop and embed this more fully within their lessons or tutorial sessions. Individuals from some of these teams then showcased their developing ideas in "quick-win" demonstrations to other staff during CPD slots. Our tutorial programme has been further developed so that discussions on a variety of issues continue to be a regular weekly feature.

We have also promoted opportunities for oracy-based enrichment. These include, amongst others, our students being involved in a Model United Nations conference to debate important issues facing the world today, our Law Mooting team (who won the regional competition and went on to represent Huish in the National Finals at the Royal Courts of Justice), and competitive debating, with two Huish students qualifying for the final of the Oxford Schools’ Debating Competition and coming sixth nationally. 

In addition, an external quality review week brought fresh insights. Visiting senior leaders from other sixth form colleges conducted learning walks and offered feedback on how well our oracy priorities had been embedded. The resulting feedback, combined with the findings from the initial student confidence surveys, was very encouraging and helped validate our collective efforts.  However, it also gave us new areas upon which to focus, in that student confidence in certain groups within the college, such as our Level 2 cohort, was less strong. Results of the student survey were shared with staff at a later CPD day, with discussion and workshops around oracy and supporting less confident groups. In response to the gaps identified, we have launched further initiatives, including a more focused Level 2 Oracy Summer Challenge and a trial mentoring scheme for disadvantaged students, focused on supporting them to grow in confidence expressing themselves.

We are completing our second year with another Oracy Challenge, where again, staff have been put into small groups for peer observation and reflections on strategies to address an element they have identified from the Cambridge Oracy Framework (Voice 21, 2024).

Looking ahead

As Simms et al. (2021) and Darling-Hammond et al. (2017) emphasise, effective professional learning must be sustained, evidence-based, and manageable. What we have found is that   reflecting upon the successes and challenges of the implementation of our approaches in regard to student oracy is starting to help us to form a working model for professional development for other whole-college initiatives, whatever those future initiatives might be. And that is quite exciting.

We’ve learned that implementation is rarely linear, and that flexibility is vital. For example, this year’s Oracy Summer Challenge clashed with the pressure of preparing Year 2 students for final exams. Feedback from staff on this issue led us to extend the timeline. This was a necessary adjustment, but a reminder too that even well-intentioned initiatives must account for workload and timing realities.

We have also found that keeping oracy visible and high-profile has been key to maintaining momentum. We’ve been transparent about the rationale and the evidence, which has helped secure staff buy-in.

Embedding oracy has been a learning journey, not just for students, but for staff as well. It has challenged us to think more deeply about implementation, impact, and the conditions needed for professional development to thrive at a whole college level. Looking ahead, we are beginning to consider our next strategic focus. Whatever this will be, we feel better equipped to lead change. Our experience has shown that meaningful change is possible—when it is intentional, well-supported, and grounded in evidence.

Sarah Marshall is assistant director of the Centre for Practitioner Development at Richard Huish College in Somerset.

References

Darling-Hammond, L., Hyler, M. E., Gardner, M. & Espinoza, D. (2017). Effective Teacher Professional Development. Learning Policy Institute.

Education Endowment Foundation (EEF). (2021). Effective Professional Development. 

English-Speaking Union. (2024). Why Oracy Matters: The Life-Changing Impact of Speaking and Listening Skills.

Independent Commission on the Future of Oracy Education in England. (2024). We Need to Talk.

Simms, M., et al. (2021). Sustaining Professional Learning for Teachers.

Voice 21. (2024). The Oracy Skills Framework.