by Ayesha Ahmed (Oracy Cambridge) and Amanda Moorghen (Voice 21)
Oracy’s back in the curriculum
The 2026 Schools’ White Paper reaffirms the government’s commitment to oracy as foundational, alongside reading, writing and numeracy. This comes on the back of a recent wave of positive policy announcements for oracy. The Curriculum and Assessment Review (CAR) highlighted its importance across subject domains, recommending improved non-statutory guidance for schools; oracy is now explicitly featured in the Initial teacher training and early career framework and in Ofsted’s latest Education Inspection Toolkits.
Does this mean we need a new oracy assessment?
With increasing attention on oracy, some are now asking – how will we know if it’s working?
Do we need an assessment to enforce these policy-level changes, or hold them to account? After all – if oracy is as important as literacy and numeracy, surely it should receive the same amount of scrutiny. The answer depends on how such an assessment is designed and how clear the intended purposes are. After all, we know from literacy and numeracy that ‘scrutiny’ can have unintended consequences.
How and why are schools currently assessing oracy?
Schools expect assessment to follow policy. Nationally, children are assessed across their schooling, from the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile (EYFSP) at age five, through End of Key Stage Tests at 11, and a range of qualifications including GCSEs and BTECs from age 16. However, beyond the EYFSP, oracy is not widely assessed. As a result, many schools feel they need to fill this gap. But with what?
As we have come to understand more about the teaching and learning of oracy – what works and what doesn’t – it has become clear that teachers and learners really want a way to judge oracy progress against criteria so they can decide what ‘level’ a child is at in a specific oracy context.
Luckily this doesn’t have to mean that we give out scores, but it does mean that we will probably end up identifying best fit levels for a student’s performance.
There is a risk at the moment that some schools feel pressure to use oracy assessments, designed for formative purposes, for higher-stakes decisions. Perhaps data is being reported externally, with funding at stake. Perhaps a teacher or school leader will be judged on the basis of these assessments. Perhaps a child will find themselves labelled, in receipt of or denied access to support. Any assessment or progression tool designer must be cognisant of these risks.
How should oracy assessment be designed?
As with the design of any assessment, we need to ask the following questions:
- What is the point? What is important here?
In assessment jargon this translates to:
What is the construct and what are the important aspects of this construct that we want to assess?
For Oracy, the Skills Framework represents the construct and is our starting point.
- What sort of evidence do we want to see that will allow us to assess this?
We need to consider what evidence represents good performance and what evidence indicates less good performance.
- How should we evaluate this evidence? What are the assessment criteria and what is the scoring mechanism? How will we assign values to performances and put them on a scale?
Here you might be thinking ‘Why do we need to put them in order and make a scale?’ With a construct such an Oracy, for which evidence is multi-level, multi-modal and ephemeral, and where judgements are so subjective, isn’t it better to make holistic judgements without assigning a score or level? And we can’t defend a score with any useful level of certainty.
So far, the Oracy Skills Framework has formed the basis for holistic judgments. Now, partly due to the CAR, schools are asking for something more detailed and analytic than the generic skills framework.
How are we responding to this?
Oracy is complex, and as such is hard to reduce to a single score or grade. In school, teachers need to be supported to retain this complexity. Do they have time for the conversation, observation and reflection needed to make consistent judgments, take part in meaningful feedback conversations, and deliver responsive teaching? Or, are they under pressure to provide single scores to ‘demonstrate progress’?
At a national level, we need assessment mechanisms that mitigate these three risks:
- narrowing our focus to what is easily assessed;
- using simple scores and grades that don’t reflect children’s strengths and weaknesses;
- and baking in our assumptions and prejudices around language use.
A positive starting point for this would be an evidence-informed progression scale, creating a shared understanding of ‘what good looks like’ across schools, ages and phases.
What about AI?
Oracy assessment can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. The current response to such situations is: Can AI just do it for us?
We could feed AI with lots of talk data from children, it could identify features of good oracy, it could generate a scale, and then generate feedback and/or give out scores.
But there are enormous dangers in allowing AI access to children’s data, in particular video data of children talking. Transcripts are another option, but this still carries dangers, and would not capture the multi-modal nature of oracy. Even with data agreements in place, we have seen through examples in other sectors that we cannot be sure that future uses of data would not change, and that surveillance uses would not emerge. It is often less resourced schools that fall prey to these dangers, where AI is used to replace rather than enhance human interactions, thus constraining opportunities to learn and exacerbating achievement gaps.
But how can I assess oracy right now?
A lot of the questions, concerns and risks we discuss above apply mostly to higher-stakes contexts for assessment. In your school, assessing your own students to inform your own teaching is a much simpler proposition. If you and your colleagues treat ‘assessment’ as a largely ongoing process, informing (not replacing!) your professional judgement, immediately a lot of the risks and ‘what ifs’ melt away.
To make a start, consider four questions:
- What am I assessing?
Consider what aspect of oracy you want to focus on. The more precise you can be, the easier it is. Perhaps you want to focus on specific aspects of the Oracy Framework that you are teaching right now; perhaps on a specific genre or context for talk.
- What task do I want to focus on?
Consider a task that allows students to demonstrate the skills or competencies you decided to focus on. Often, this will be something that’s part of your ordinary teaching and learning (e.g. discussing the class story on their tables), but sometimes, it may be a special occasion for talk (e.g. a speech day at the end of a unit on speechmaking)
- What does good look like?
Use the Oracy Framework to help you articulate for yourself and for students what success looks like. Describe the things it is simple to describe (e.g. ‘face the speaker’) and model the things it is harder to describe (here’s an example of someone using a really engaging tone of voice). The stronger your shared understanding of success – between you and your class; you and your colleagues – the more robust this process will be.
- What kind of reporting is required?
Consider how you want to report on this assessment. This could be very simple – verbal or written feedback for students; a note you make for yourself; a conversation with a colleague to understand how your class compares to the class next door. Occasionally, you may need or want to provide a simple holistic grade or written narrative, or store video evidence.