Oracy
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School leaders<br />
Support from senior leaders plays a critical role in increasing the status and uptake of oracy-based<br />
teaching strategies across a school. Several interviewees argue that it would be near impossible to<br />
embed such approaches without support from leadership.<br />
Linking oracy to Ofsted<br />
Susannah Haygarth is Language and Literacy<br />
Coordinator at Chorlton High School in<br />
Manchester. She explains that leaders in her<br />
school feel oracy will help her school improve<br />
its Ofsted rating in light of recent inspection<br />
feedback that suggests pupils should be<br />
invited to contribute more in class discussions:<br />
“We had Ofsted at the end of July in the last week<br />
before we broke up, and we got ‘Good’ and we felt<br />
that we nearly got ‘Outstanding’, …and now what<br />
we feel is needed to push up to ‘Outstanding’ as a<br />
school is almost like reaching for the next level, the<br />
next level of learning, and we think that oracy is really<br />
going to elevate us and our kids to be able to do<br />
things that they couldn’t do before”<br />
Susannah Haygarth, Language and Literacy Coordinator,<br />
Chorlton High School<br />
Given school leadership’s enthusiasm, the<br />
challenge at Chorlton High School is now<br />
one of delivery rather than mindset:<br />
“At the very top our school leaders one hundred<br />
per cent believe that talk is the precursor to good<br />
learning … but I think for a lot of schools nowadays<br />
that is a complete shift [in thinking…]. What we have<br />
to do now is, it’s not teachers taking it seriously, it’s<br />
us as leaders within the school making [oracy]<br />
a reality. It’s that culture shift”<br />
Susannah Haygarth, Language and Literacy Coordinator,<br />
Chorlton High School<br />
Furthermore, while our survey indicates few school leaders actively discourage oracy,<br />
many interviewees feel that school leaders rarely actively endorse it or, more importantly,<br />
make it a priority in their school. This can be because they have other priorities, believe<br />
oracy happens ‘anyway’, or do not think it is relevant.<br />
Interviewees suggest that one way to ‘deliver’ oracy is to have a named person take<br />
responsibility for it, helping raise its status and improving classroom practice. Yet this<br />
approach remains rare, with just over a tenth of survey respondents aware of someone<br />
in their school holding such a role. xxxvii<br />
66<br />
xxxvii<br />
Practitioners were asked about who at their school is responsible for oracy, with oracy defined as ‘the development of children’s<br />
capacity to use speech to express their thoughts and communicate with others in education and in life, and talk through which teaching and<br />
learning is mediated’ (based on Alexander, 2012: 10).