Oracy

Hello, and welcome to our Oracy page

Oracy is all about our spoken language and how we are able to express ourselves well. Through explicit teaching of oracy, we aim to develop our pupils language skills as well as their listening skills. We use Voice21 to help support and guide us with our aims. Voice21 are the UK's leading Education Oracy charity, and we are committed to ensuring we provide our children with the oracy skills they need to succeed not only in academic study and in school, but in their lives and as they grow to become adult citizens. Voice 21 define oracy as 'ability to articulate and engage with others and through helping our children becoming better speakers and listeners, we empower them to understand themselves better, each other and the world around them.' 'It is also a route to social mobility, empowering all students to find their voice to succeed in school and life.' 

Whether we are tackling complex issues or having a conversation with someone, the way in which we can articulate and understand others helps us to engage with others and get our view points across. It is our ability to convey our thoughts, feelings and ideas with the desired effect and to our audience.

Oracy is;

• engaging with others and ideas
• reasoning
• ability to convey messages and to express ourselves
• listening to understand
• speaking and listening
• challenging people
• telling compelling stories
• developing arguments
• the skills to debate
• presenting
• expressing yourself
• speaking up and standing up for what you believe in

Below is a short video from Voice21 explaining what oracy is and aims;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shi1K1SepQI

Intent and vision

At St Stephens our vision is to have oracy at the heart of all learning and for this to be evident throughout all of our curriculum and day to day life, so that we can encourage a talk rich environment at all time. We expect all of our learners to develop good oracy skills, and we o this by empowering all learners to become confident and effective speakers. We explicitly teach good oracy skills and create environments and a culture of respect and tryst, in which all children understand that every voice matters, so that our children can also go on to succeed beyond the school walls and feel confident that their voice will be heard. 

Implementing 

We already have lots of strategies at St Stephens to support our pupils with their oracy skills, including but not limited to;

• talk for writing performances in assembly time
• word banks for subjects and subject knowledge mat vocabulary
• displays in school with stem sentences on 
• kagan group strategies
• plenty of discussions times planned into lessons
• quality first teaching
• discussions during assembly time
• pr-teach vocabulary work
• EAL support and speech and language intervention support
• passport for life
• pupils voice- care council, school council, worship wardens
• having high expectations

We also recognise the importance of early language support and the development of early language in reception, we implement lots of strategies into the EYFS such as;

• plenty of role play and play opportunities
• reception and year 6 buddies
• lots of visuals
• well.com language intervention and throughout provision opportunities 
• interventions
• lots of vocabulary and language interventions
• nurture groups and key workers groups
• lots of play

We aim to improve our oracy by teaching oracy explicitly and using voice 21 to support us. Children will benefit from more opportunities to enhance their oracy skills that have been planned cross-curricularly and by using supported resources available to them. We strive to have very high standards and to ensure all children will understand that they have a voice and deserves to be heard. 

We use the 4 strands of oracy skills, as outlined by voice 21, to help support our explicit teaching of good oracy skills throughout our daily curriculum and life. We follow the key stage specific outlines also for what good oracy looks like across EYFS, KS1 and KS2.

Through this, our children will learn and understand the physical, cognitive, linguistic and social and emotional skills that are needed to enable successful discussion, inspiring speech and commuication and overall good oracy skills.