When most lessons were taking place through a screen (often with pupils’ cameras and microphones off), speaking skills were, understandably, not high on many schools’ priority lists. But before the pandemic, a group of schools in Tower Hamlets, London, formed an “oracy hub”, putting spoken language at the heart of learning - and they were determined to keep this hugely successful approach going. Hub participants Nicky Pear and Nicole Gurvidi explain how they did it.

Tes: How did oracy become a focus for you?

Nicky Pear and Nicole Gurvidi: A few years ago at Cubitt Town Junior School, we began addressing the fact that our children were quite passive. We wanted to place meaningful talk at the heart of our curriculum and develop a culture of oracy throughout the school. The following year was spent raising the profile of oracy to be in line with literacy and numeracy as the bedrock of teaching and learning.

What did that look like?

Protocols for purposeful talk were established, every lesson was expected to have an oracy outcome of some kind and assemblies were transformed into dialogic sessions with our children sitting in circles.

The impact took us by surprise. Within the first year, our children were using their voices with a new purpose and confidence. Previously quiet classrooms were now buzzing with talk, and children and staff were excited by the new dimension that a focus on oracy was bringing. What’s more, this shift in approach was beginning to lead to improvements across the curriculum, including written outcomes, vocabulary retention and mathematical reasoning.

How did that develop into the oracy hub?

It felt as though we had hit upon a goldmine that was too good not to share with schools in the borough. That led to us creating the Tower Hamlets Oracy Hub. In partnership with the Tower Hamlets Education Partnership, our vision was to create a learning community where teachers could develop ideas, share practice and work together to improve the teaching and learning of oracy. The hub began training up a cohort of oracy leaders in schools across the borough to raise the profile of talk in their own classrooms and those of their colleagues. We worked with Voice 21, an oracy education charity, which provided a training programme covering the theoretical side of oracy, as well as a range of practical strategies.

And then lockdown happened. What was the initial reaction?

As with many aspects of education, we worried that the lockdown would bring the progress we had been making to a screeching halt. We were also deeply concerned that children in our borough, many of whom don’t live in talk-rich environments, might spend weeks with limited access to conversation and opportunities to use their voice. Furthermore, in the absence of regular socialising with friends, there would be narrower chances to develop speaking and listening skills.

So, what strategies did you put in place?

In online learning, as in classrooms, setting up protocols for talking was key: agreed discussion guidelines helped to frame expectations, from exhibiting positive body language and showing proof of listening, to talking at an appropriate pitch and agreeing and disagreeing politely with others.

We also made sure that all children had an opportunity to use their voices each day with oracy icebreakers to accompany the register or a daily talk stimulus to start the morning. More in-depth discussions on Google Classroom also proved fruitful in many schools, with the written chat function used to supplement verbal feedback, allowing for participation even in the face of frozen or stuttering videos. We used apps such as Jamboard and Padlet to collate ideas prior to a discussion, and specific talk roles helped to structure guided reading sessions with children taught to agree, disagree, build on and challenge one another’s points.

Scaffolds for talk, including sentence stems and pictorial prompts, were helpful in creating an inclusive learning environment for talk. We also tried to cater for the more performative side of oracy with show-and-tell activities, story times and poetry recitals.

Maintaining a whole-school culture of oracy with classes so separate was tough, but things like oracy stars of the week, recorded performances and oracy updates in online assemblies helped to ensure that talk continued to be valued and celebrated. Children were able to share ideas, discuss things with each other, read their work aloud and, at times, simply have a chat with their teacher and friends - these are things that it is easy to take for granted in more normal times, but which remote learning has really made us aware of.

And how will you approach oracy now that schools are open more fully again?

We are putting talk at the heart of our catch-up approach, ensuring that children are given regular opportunities to use their voices for a variety of purposes. This needn’t be instead of catching up elsewhere, but rather complementing the task of helping our children to recover from the prolonged disruption to their education.

What advice would you offer to schools wanting to implement something similar?

Given the physical distance that we have all had to endure over the past year, it feels like now, more than ever, we should be strengthening bonds across the profession. We would highly recommend joining the growing community of schools and teachers who are making the educational and moral case for raising the profile of oracy. This is initially about convincing senior leaders that this is a change worth making, as cultivating a whole-school approach to oracy is far more likely to be effective. Pointing them towards the compelling research on oracy, particularly from Cambridge University and the EEF, would be a great start.

Working collaboratively in Tower Hamlets has been a fantastic way to develop a network of colleagues moving forward together, sharing ideas and learning from each other’s experiences. It feels like we are on the cusp of a significant change in education in this country. More and more schools are developing an approach to oracy teaching and learning, and an All-Party Parliamentary Group made the case in January for “better support for teachers to embed oracy in their classrooms and raised expectations for pupils’ entitlement to quality oracy teaching”.

Our advice would be to become part of this change and work with other schools to ensure that all children can find their voice and feel empowered to use it.

Nicky Pear is assistant headteacher at Cubitt Town Junior School in Tower Hamlets, East London. Nicole Gurvidi is primary curriculum lead in English at the Tower Hamlets Education Partnership

This article originally appeared in the 12 March 2021 issue under the headline “How I kept pupils talking through lockdown and beyond”