Woolsery Primary School: Oracy
Contents
What do we mean by Oracy?
Oracy is the development of listening and speaking skills, including dialogic talk which is a key foundation of our ability to comminicate effectively.
Oracy is what the school does to support the development of children’s capacity to use speech to express their thoughts and communicate with others in education and in life (Alexander, 2017)
The development of Oracy skills has been shown to reduce the gap between disadvantaged children and their peers and is essential for effective learning. Our school was lucky enough to be part of the initiaitve run through Dartmoor Teaching School Alliance by Plymouth Teaching School Alliance following a highly successful programme carried out in Plymouth schools which led to a substantial increase in attainment for the most disadvantaged.
Teachers have received training and support to develop Oracy across the curriculum in our school and, althouhg badly interrupted by parital closures due to Covid-19, has already been shown to have been successful in improving written and oral outcomes for our children.
The Oracy Framework
We use Voice 21’s Oracy Framework to underpin our work in this important area. It breaks down the acquisition of skills into key areas of Physical, Linguistic, Cognitive and Social & Emotional
Classroom Expectations
Through our Oracy project, we have developed some basic expectations in our classrooms and a shared understanding amongst the children and staff:
Impact: Oracy in Action
Due to disruption around Coronavirus in 2020 and 2021 the embedding of Oracy across the school has been disrupted. However, children are quickly responding to ideas like remembering to stand when speaking, using sentence stems to frame their spoken work and the use of dialogic talk in the classroom. Once these practises have been fully re-embedded, we will resume monitoring outcomes for the children in terms of both written and and spoken English.
This is the impact report from Plymouth Teaching School from their original Oracy work, on which our own training was based:
The Plymouth Oracy Project – Final Outcomes Report
Links with other areas
Our strategy for the teaching of Writing is intrinsically linked to other areas of the English curriculum: