Speaking & Listening

Our vision for Oracy at St Chad’s is for children to be prepared for the future and become confident speakers who can talk about their learning as experts, use their talk to share their thoughts and feelings and utilise speaking and listening to learn more.

At St Chad’s C.E. Primary School, we recognise that oracy allows pupils to develop culturally, emotionally, intellectually, socially and spiritually. Our carefully planned oracy curriculum enables pupils to acquire knowledge and build on what they already know, as well as allowing them to develop their oracy skills. Giving our children the skill of oracy is essential for them to participate fully in society. We aim to promote high standards of language by equipping pupils with a strong understanding of the spoken word and to develop a love of communication through oracy for a range of purposes. At St Chad’s we achieve these goals through high expectations of vocabulary, sentence stems and collaborative talk with peers.

Our oracy curriculum begins from the moment our youngest children enter our school setting. Children in Early Years under go the ‘Stoke Speaks Out’ assessment in the first few weeks of school, and those requiring the intervention take part in this straight away. We work closely with our Speech and Language Therapists and aim to make referrals as early as possible to ensure our children are equipped with the tools they need to communicate. The Early Years is full of oracy opportunities, a great deal of time is given to the adult to be ‘interactors’ with our children to ensure speaking is modelled during play and to dedicate time for holding a conversation with individuals, so there is time to ask and answer questions.  

We want children to leave school as confident speakers and so provide oracy opportunities through drama and role play, class assemblies, presentations, debates, school productions and much more. We use oracy to develop the high-quality teaching and learning in our classrooms. Children are aware of the expectations of them as speakers and listeners during collaborative learning and we have Oracy Rules displayed in each classroom. Oracy progression is weaved within our curriculum and we ensure that oracy opportunities are central to our curriculum and plan opportunities for this in all subjects. Each term, for each foundation subject, a lesson outcome is oracy based. This may be presenting findings to another class or debating on a topic.

Children leave St Chad’s having had access to a wide and varied range of high-quality oracy experiences, which helps them communicate effectively as they continue the learning journey. They leave us as confident speakers who can share their own thoughts and feelings in a diplomatic, respectful way.