Oracy and Storytelling in schools – recent developments 8 Apr 4:29 PM (25 days ago)
In this blog, prompted by the publication of the Oracy Commission’s report, ‘We Need to Talk’ (CLICK HERE) in October 2024, I am going to explore the evidence I provided to the Commission on behalf of the SfS and reflect on storytelling as an essential part of classroom oracy. The Oracy Commission’s report is specific to the schools’ context in England where, many would argue, spoken language has been marginalised since the 2014 National Curriculum introduced by the Conservative-led government of the time. However, the place of storytelling in the classroom has been a live issue for as long as I have been a storyteller (considerably longer than the ten years since the 2014 National Curriculum), and there may well be aspects of the discussion that are relevant to storytellers in other jurisdictions which are not covered by the curriculum in England. BACKGROUND Before going any further, I need to define the word ‘oracy’ that gives its name to the commission. The term ‘oracy’ was first used by Andrew Wilkinson (a British educationalist) in the 1960s to refer to the use of spoken language, providing a contrast to ‘literacy’ which refers to written language. Perhaps because ‘oracy’ sounds to some like educational jargon, the alternatives of ‘speaking and listening’ and ‘spoken language’ have been used in policy documents (including the National Curriculum and the Early Years Foundation Stage Framework). However, the danger of reduction is inherent within each of these three terms, with the individual action of speech being privileged, (and specifically the language of that speech) over other aspects of communication. I was recently in a meeting with teachers and academics where the alternative of ‘communication, language and dialogue’ was suggested, and (while something of a mouthful) this title manages to include both the linguistic content and the social nature of communication, and also provides space for the non-linguistic aspects of communication such as vocal tone, body language and use of space – things that storytellers hold dear. However, ‘oracy’ is the word that is used in the report, and is on the lips of policy makers at present, and so I will stick with the terminology for this blog. In May 2019, the Oracy All Party Parliamentary Group launched the Speak for Change Inquiry which produced an interim report in April 2021 (CLICK HERE to read the report). For those of us who have worked in education for some time, there was nothing particularly new or startling in the report, but it was positive that the importance of oracy was being recognised again, and oracy education promoted – even if it appeared to have little impact on the government of the time. The All Party Parliamentary Group held a follow-up meeting in the Palace of Westminster in October 2023 which I attended as an observer. I was somewhat surprised that there was unanimity in the expectation of the group (given its ‘all-party’ nature) that there would be a change of government when the election was called, and that oracy would be integral to the educational reforms of a Labour government. I am writing this two months into the government that was elected into power in the UK in July 2024 and, as suggested at October’s meeting, oracy has been part of the ongoing discussions about curriculum reform in England. THE ORACY COMMISSION The Commission on the Future of Oracy Education in England was established as an independent commission, chaired by Geoff Barton and hosted by Voice 21 (a free school in London that is dedicated to an education which has oracy at its core). The Commission put out a call for evidence between March and May 2024, and a range of individuals and organisations made submissions. Sadly, despite registering my SfS email address as an interested party, I didn’t receive notification of the Commission’s call for evidence, and only found out about it through social media a short time before submissions were due. This meant that there was not enough time to put out a request for input from members of the society, and I had to rely on combining my knowledge drawn from being a co-convener of the Storytellers in Schools Forum with my own work. However, part of the submitted bundle was an extensive bibliography of articles and books on using storytelling in education which, I hope, provided further breadth of perspectives on storytelling in education. For storytellers, I suspect that it is not controversial to suggest that storytelling should have a significant place within oracy as part of the curriculum and on that basis, I submitted an evidence bundle of 4000+ words on behalf of the SfS. The submissions were made online and organised into several sections. In my entries for each area of the online form I emphasised the benefits of developing young people’s oral storytelling, both as an art in itself, but also as an essential means of making sense of the world around them, the role of teachers in fostering development in children’s oral storytelling, and the role that professional storytellers have as models of effective oracy (as well as their potential to support teachers). I have summarised the evidence that I provided to the Commission at the end of this article, along with the prompts to which each section of evidence was responding. In all honesty, I didn’t expect my submission to have much impact on the final report of the Oracy Commission. However, storytelling is highlighted on page 15, (even if there is, I fear, some conflation with drama) and so we can celebrate that storytelling has been identified as an essential element of oracy, and the acknowledgement of the SfS as one of the six organisations that helped ‘shape the Commission’s thinking’ is something that we can hold onto. We can have no idea of the specifics of the education reform that is to come. It is clear, from the conversations that I have been having, that there is little appetite for wholesale reform (with the attendant teacher
