Oracy Is Not Optional: Why Spoken Language Belongs in Your School Improvement Plan
Oracy has moved from a fringe interest to a national conversation, and most school leaders now have a view on it. The harder question is what it means for your improvement plan, given that you’re already balancing reading, behaviour, attendance and a SEND register that keeps growing.
The argument for treating spoken language as a leadership priority rather than an English curriculum topic is straightforward. Almost everything else you’re trying to improve runs through it.
What the oracy agenda is really asking for
At its narrowest, oracy means teaching children to speak well: presentation skills, debate, structured discussion. That’s worth doing, and plenty of schools do it well.
At its broadest, and more usefully, oracy means treating talk as the medium through which learning happens rather than a subject alongside it. That means pupils talking to think, not only talking to perform, and adults using talk deliberately rather than incidentally.
The second version is harder to implement and considerably more valuable. It’s also the version that exposes which pupils can’t access learning delivered through talk, which is where the leadership case gets serious.
The links leaders should know about
Three connections make oracy a whole-school issue rather than a curriculum one.
The first is attainment. Oral language skills in the early years are among the stronger predictors of later reading comprehension, because a child cannot comprehend in text what they cannot comprehend in speech. The Education Endowment Foundation rates oral language interventions as high impact for relatively low cost, which is an unusual combination in school improvement.
The second is behaviour. A meaningful proportion of pupils who present with distressed or disengaged behaviour have unidentified speech, language and communication needs (SLCN). A child who can’t follow the instruction, can’t ask for clarification without exposing themselves, and can’t put frustration into words has limited options. Behaviour is communication, and some of the most persistent behaviour concerns in a school are communication concerns that nobody has named yet.
The third is disadvantage. Differences in early language exposure are well documented and they arrive at your gate on the first day of Reception. Vocabulary and oral language are among the areas where targeted school action can make a genuine difference, which makes this a legitimate and evidence-informed use of Pupil Premium funding.
Why SLCN sits underneath the oracy agenda
Here’s the tension. An oracy push raises the talk demand across the school. For most pupils that’s exactly the point. For pupils with SLCN, raising the talk demand without changing the support can make school harder, not better.
In a typical class you can expect a spread that includes children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), children whose speech is harder for unfamiliar listeners to understand, autistic children whose social communication works differently from their peers’, children who stammer, children with selective mutism, and children learning English as an additional language. An oracy strategy that assumes a level playing field will widen gaps rather than close them.
The schools that do this well build the adjustments into the strategy from the start: alternative routes to contribute, structured talk formats that reduce exposure, extended thinking time as a norm rather than a concession, and visual support as standard practice.
Building it into the school improvement plan
A workable oracy strand usually has four components.
- Staff capability. Most teachers were never taught how to use talk deliberately. Training on adult talk, wait time, vocabulary teaching and supporting pupils with SLCN gives a better return than any resource purchase.
- A shared approach to vocabulary. Choosing and explicitly teaching tier two vocabulary across subjects, rather than leaving it to individual teachers, is one of the more reliable moves available.
- Structured talk in every classroom. Partner talk, group roles and sentence stems make talk accessible to pupils who would never volunteer an answer to the whole class.
- Identification and support for pupils who need more. An oracy strategy without a clear route from “this child isn’t accessing it” to assessment and support is only serving the pupils who were already fine.
Approaches worth knowing about
Several therapy-informed approaches scale well to whole-class teaching. Colourful Semantics, which uses colour coding to make sentence structure visible, was developed for children with language difficulties but works as a whole-class tool for teaching sentence construction. Word Aware offers a structured approach to vocabulary teaching across a school. Shape Coding supports grammar explicitly.
None of these are magic but all we use here routinely at our partner schools. They work when staff are trained properly and use them consistently, and they gather dust when they’re introduced in a twilight session and never mentioned again. That’s a leadership implementation question rather than a resource question.
What to measure
Oracy is harder to evidence than reading, which is part of why it drops off improvement plans. A few things are practical to track.
- Baseline and follow-up language measures for a target cohort, most usefully in Reception and Year 1.
- The proportion of pupils contributing in lessons, gathered through learning walks rather than self-report.
- Vocabulary retention against the words you’ve explicitly taught.
- Referral and identification rates for SLCN, which should rise before they fall as identification improves.
- Staff confidence, surveyed before and after training.
Be honest with governors about the timescale. Language change is slower than phonics change and the evidence base reflects that. What you can reasonably show in a year is better identification, better staff practice and better access for pupils who were previously excluded from classroom talk.
| We deliver whole-staff and SENCo training on supporting speech, language and communication in schools across London, Kent and Essex, covering therapy-informed approaches, neurodivergent-affirming practice and how to measure impact. If your oracy strategy needs the SLCN side building in, get in touch at enquiries@londonspeechtherapy.co.uk or call 020 3475 2189. |
