Oracy
We are a Voice 21 Oracy Centre of Excellence 2024
Intent
Our intent is for all our pupils to be confident speakers, agile communicators, and effective listeners. We believe that developing oracy throughout primary education provides our students with vital life skills. We aim to encourage fluent speakers, who are confident to communicate, debate and present in a wide range of situations.
We want all pupils to be able to use their voice confidently across a range of different contexts, to adapt their use of language for a range of different purposes and audiences, to recognise the importance of listening in conjunction with speaking and listening and to apply all the learnt oracy skills to all areas of the curriculum and in their wider lives.
Implementation
At Earlham Primary there is a shared understanding of how talk supports learning and children’s social development
Voice 21
We are a Voice 21 partner school, committed: to transform oracy teaching and learning across the school, enabling all students to access and benefit from a high-quality oracy education.
Through establishing a whole-school commitment to oracy, teachers and school leaders are empowered, passionate and motivated to ensure that the voice of all students is valued in school and beyond.
Each year, as a Voice 21 Oracy School, we choose one of three pathways through which to develop our school’s oracy provision and drive whole-school improvements in oracy. As part of each pathway, our school benefits from an in-depth programme of professional development days and consultancy support (in school and online). These pathways provide our staff with the tools we need to ensure oracy permeates all aspects of school life and drive whole-school change.
Earlham’s Oracy Framework
Earlham’s Oracy Framework
We use Earlham’s Oracy Framework to carefully plan oracy opportunities into English and wider curriculum lessons. Questions are differentiated to ensure full participation and pupil discussions are scaffolded by using KS1 and KS2 differentiated focused sentence stems to ensure progression. Every term there is a whole school focus for ‘Talk Purpose’ in English and non-core subjects. Teachers plan a talk outcome, authentic audiences, grouping, questions and talk tactic sentence stems to link with the focus ‘Talk Purpose’.
We also use the Voice 21 oracy framework, which breaks down the teaching of speaking and listening into four strands:
Physical
Cognitive
Linguistic
Social and Emotional
These four strands enable successful discussion, inspiring speech and effective communication.
Teachers use the Oracy Framework to praise and highlight the achievements of the students. Pupils use the framework in class and during the oracy phase assemblies to self-assess, peer-assess, and talk about talk.
Discussion Guidelines
We use a set of guidelines for partner and group discussion that help to maintain a safe, effective and respectful environment for talk.
Talking Tools
Talking Tools allow our pupils to self-govern talk. These also help to develop speaking and listening skills.