After some years of experts calling for it, last November the curriculum and assessment review recommended that the government introduce an oracy framework for schools.

A team has now been tasked with using the review’s recommendations to design a new national curriculum. Whether or not they will introduce an oracy framework remains to be seen.

But even if we don’t get a structured framework, oracy must be treated as more than just a tick-box exercise.

In the primary classroom, oracy can sometimes be reduced to a brief “talk partner” moment or “say it, write it” process. I have personally always liked these practices. But more often than not, they don’t make the most of oracy’s potential to support literacy.

When pupils engage their voice before they begin to write, writing becomes a natural extension of meaning, rather than a silent task. Yet if we only use talk exercises as a brief precursor to writing, we risk missing out on the full benefits of this process.

Oracy is not just an add-on; it’s where literacy begins. After all, storytelling is a lived experience.

So how can we use this knowledge to better engage pupils?

Using oracy to support literacy

Start with movement

Before children can write with authorial confidence, they must first be able to speak, hear, rehearse and inhabit that voice. As a former actor, I have found that starting with movement, narration and lived experience can be the most effective way into purposeful writing - especially for children who need language to be felt before it can be fixed on the page.

How does this work in practice with a primary class? After choosing a topic, this is the process I have settled on:

1. Start with building a sense of atmosphere, whether by playing a live soundscape, recorded music or showing images.

2. Give pupils a narrator to inhabit with personality and voice. Make it relatable.

3. Rehearse vocabulary aloud, collectively and playfully. Actions are a must.

4. Use movement to deepen meaning and emotional tone. For example, how might you act out adjectives?

5. Move from talk to text with heavy scaffolds and sentence stems. Allow higher ability children to thwart the rules.

Embodied oracy

This term, when my Year 2 class was learning about the Great Fire of London, I explored how embodied oracy could help pupils to write with greater focus on vocabulary, viewpoint and narrative voice.

We started with atmosphere, not pencils. I played a crackling fireplace soundscape and asked the children simply to listen.

I then challenged the pupils to imagine the story of the Great Fire from the fire’s perspective. Before writing, they were already rehearsing a voice.

We then embodied the narrator through guided play and imagination. We focused on feelings and actions: how might the fire feel as it spreads? This helped the pupils to understand that authorial voice is not just a point of view. It is an attitude, a presence. Before it is expressed on the page, it needs to be imagined, felt and lived.

We rehearsed vocabulary through the body. As the drama built, so did the language. Children explored words such as roar, flicker, gobble, feast, unstoppable. Rather than just learning this new vocabulary, they experienced it. This embodied rehearsal gave them greater confidence when writing later.

The next step was to use collective storytelling to build narrative shape. Through teacher narration, pupils followed the fire’s journey, which became a shared narrative structure: a beginning, build-up, climax and ending. Writing was no longer abstract. The children had lived the story shape.

The pivotal moment came when the fire “escaped” the bakery, moving from the classroom into the playground, which became the city. I took the class outside.

Supporting inclusion

In the lessons that followed, we began to write. Storymapping and writing flowed with far greater confidence. Pupils wrote with sustained voice, maintaining the fire’s arrogant viewpoint across an opening, middle and end. They drew directly on vocabulary that had already been spoken, acted and rehearsed.

Crucially, this approach also supported inclusion: children who might struggle with extended independent writing had already accessed the learning through movement, shared language and oral rehearsal.

For young writers especially, this embodied oracy approach reminds us that authorial voice is not something that children simply produce on demand. It is something they must first be allowed to speak, feel and become.

Louise Gaunson is a London primary teacher and former literacy and oracy lead

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