Oracy is the golden thread that weaves together all teaching and learning at Richard Lee. Having confident speaking and listening skills enables our learners to express their thoughts, feelings, understanding and ideas fluently. It also helps them to clarify their thinking and to understand new concepts. From the first days in school, speaking and listening plays a large part in a child’s progress in all curriculum areas and teachers plan for the development of these skills in a wide variety of ways.
Oracy can be described as a combination of learning to talk and learning through talk. We believe that developing spoken language throughout primary education provides our students with vital life skills. Our aim is to develop fluent speakers, who are confident to discuss, present, debate and perform, in a wide range of situations so that they leave Richard Lee as confident communicators.
We are working with Voice 21 and use their benchmarks to enable us to implement oracy in our school. This enables us to have an ambitious vision where we can build a culture of oracy within, and across, our curriculum and school life. Through high-level training, leadership and support we can ensure we have high expectations of spoken language, where we value every voice and teach oracy skills explicitly.