Do children in England talk too little?

“RESPECTFULLY, I DISAGREE,” declares a youngster at Torriano Primary School in Camden, in north London, mustering all the gravitas that eight years on Earth can provide. Her class is studying “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” but they are also practising how to take part in a debate, by taking turns to say which character they think gets the worst deal. In a nearby classroom older children learn how to grab an audience’s attention by changing the volume and pace of their speech. In a reception class, cross-legged moppets wax nostalgically about the things they liked best when they were young.

Torriano, like a growing number of schools in England, takes pride in pumping up pupils’ “oracy”. That word, which roughly means “speaking and listening”, was coined in the 1960s by academics who believed that children’s oral language skills deserved as much attention from schools as their numeracy and literacy. In recent years this thinking has gained currency in the Labour Party. In a speech in March, Sir Keir Starmer said he would ensure oracy is “woven into everything our children learn”. On July 19th his new government launched a review of England’s national curriculum, whose ambitions include ensuring that “every young person gets the opportunity to develop…speaking and listening skills particularly prized by employers”.

No one much doubts that fluent speech breeds success in school and life. Kids who are encouraged to talk a lot when they are little tend to have less trouble learning to read and write. Silver-tongued speakers find it easier to ace job interviews, best rivals in meetings and convince bosses to give them a pay rise. Plenty of people worry that technology risks making youngsters less eloquent. Teens spend less time than they used to on the blower and more of it sending each other emojis.

England’s national curriculum does already demand that schools try to churn out articulate speakers. The problem—at least according to a cross-party parliamentary group that examined the issue in 2021—is that approaches are “patchy and inconsistent”. Teachers naturally prefer to spend time on things that get formally assessed. For a while oral presentations did count towards grades in GCSE English but that ended in 2014 amid worries about inconsistent scoring. Secondary-school pupils in France have to do well in an oral examination to earn their baccalauréat; similar tests help decide whether pupils pass the Abitur, Germany’s school-leaving qualification.

Reviewing the curriculum could be a drawn-out process: it is unlikely that anything would actually change until at least late 2026. It could also be a fraught one, since alterations to the curriculum tend to create a lot of work for teachers. But there is nothing to stop the government from sending head teachers much more detailed guidance, such as model lesson plans. It could seek to play up oracy education in teachers’ training. And it could encourage Ofsted, the schools inspector, to examine more closely whether schools are meeting requirements that already exist.

But to make a difference Labour will have to decide where it stands on some thorny debates. A lot of enthusiasts insist that driving up kids’ speaking and listening skills involves much more than laying on extra classes in rhetoric. They recommend that educators change the way they teach all manner of disciplines (by, for example, carving out more time within maths and science classes for pupils to take part in group debates).

That is a red rag to teachers with more traditional views. They say England’s schools have lately risen up international league tables precisely because they have resisted faddish but poorly evidenced pedagogies that promise to burnish vague “soft skills”. Sceptics also question whether the art of speaking and listening is quite as sophisticated as oracy’s loudest advocates make out. The most persuasive speakers tend to be those who are passionate about, and have deep knowledge in, the subjects on which they are talking. Kids need less help being taught how to talk than they do learning simultaneous equations.

Perhaps the most crucial question for Labour is how to track the impact of better oracy education. Measuring speaking and listening skills is perfectly possible, but doing it reliably and at scale tends to take a lot more work than grading how well pupils can write or add up. Campaigners have generally not rushed to propose solutions to this problem. Talking about oracy is easier than turning it into rigorous policy. ■