Oracy is the ability to articulate ideas, develop understanding and engage with others through spoken language. 

At Redmile, we are working with Voice 21 to develop our children’s Oracy skills and enhance their speaking and listening. Oracy is used across the curriculum to encourage discussion and talk. 

The benefits of Oracy skills go far beyond academic achievement and employability; they boost a whole range of social, emotional, and interpersonal skills, including self-confidence, self-awareness, resilience, and empathy. 

Oracy has enabled children in our school to improve their confidence in communicating effectively with one another, expressing their opinion, and participating in discussions both verbally and non-verbally. The sentence stems that we have embedded in our planning across the curriculum helps to guide class discussions, whilst also ensuring that all children can access the learning.  

The Oracy Framework 

Children are taught through the 4 strands of Oracy: 

• Physical – how we talk 

• Cognitive – what we say 

• Linguistic – which words to use 

• Social – consideration of the audience 

We practise listening skills, appropriate register and the consideration of the audience we are talking to. 

Sometimes, children don’t need to speak in full sentences. Exploratory talk is about using informal language to explore ideas. We teach how we can then communicate these ideas to any audience through presentational talk. We also teach children how to respectfully disagree and challenge others’ opinions. 

In each classroom, we display our discussion guidelines, as well as key sentence stems to challenge, probe, clarify, instigate, develop and summarise ideas in a discussion.