Oracy in the ascendant | Rethinking Ed 2023 line-up announced | Curriculum for Wales

Hello my fathomless friends

Here are five hot slices of Rethinking Education news to gobble up with your eyes and brains:

1. Oracy in the ascendant!

2. Rethinking Ed 2023 line-up announced

3. Exciting happenings in Wales

4. How do you solve a problem like Ofsted?

5. Take part in research on student agency

Let’s get into it!

1. Oracy in the ascendant!

As you may be aware, Sir Keir Starmer recently announced that Labour plans to place oracy at the centre of their mission to transform education. This is super exciting and long overdue.

In case you aren’t familiar, the word oracy was invented in the 1960s in an attempt to give spoken language the same status as written literacy and numeracy.

Almost 60 years later, despite much progress having been made in terms of our understanding of oracy, speaking and listening skills remain largely underdeveloped in schools, where reading and writing still rule the roost.

This is frustrating, because there is a wealth of evidence that teaching children how to speak and listen effectively leads to all kinds of good things, from raising attainment to improving social and emotional learning to improving future earnings. But there is so much more to it than that.

People often define oracy as 'speaking and listening skills'. I did it myself two paragraphs ago. But learning how to speak and listen with confidence in a range of contexts – from small talk to delivering a knock-out speech – is way more important than simply 'learning a skill' like riding a bike or learning to juggle.

Learning how to speak and listen effectively is transformational. It makes you walk an inch taller. It changes the way you see yourself and the way that other people see you. It changes how you think about what you might go on to do in the future. And it makes you much more likely to be a happy, healthy human being.

If you work in a school and you’re interested in developing oracy, at Rethinking Education (and also at Oracy Cambridge) we offer training for schools on all aspects of spoken language and communication. Not just schools in fact - this week I’ve been working at the National Gallery, to kick-start a three-year project designed to use their incredible collection of paintings to develop speaking and listening among disadvantaged pupils from three schools.

In the coming years, I’d like to work with schools to develop bespoke whole-school oracy curricula, designed to meet the needs of your learners.

If you’re interested, feel free drop me a line!

2. Rethinking Ed 2023 line-up announced

We’ve just released the line-up for Rethinking Ed 2023, which will take place at Parliament Hill School in North London on Saturday 23rd September. Check out our rather lovely new poster:

Tickets are selling fast – and you can see why! We’re running a 10% discount until the end of July. If you’d like to take advantage of this offer, the discount is already pre-loaded on the Eventbrite page.

The conference is low-cost, and we offer lots of free and reduced tickets to people who need them. We’re able to do this because we off-set the ticket price through sponsors and exhibitors.

If you work for an organisation and you would like to sponsor the conference, which will be attended by 500 of the loveliest people you can imagine, you can have an exhibit stand, an ad in the programme, a flyer in the conference bag – or all three!

If you’d like to sponsor the conference – or if you know someone who might be interested – drop me a line.

3. Exciting happenings in Wales

For the last 6 months, Wales has been running a national pilot of Making Change Stick, a training programme I’ve been developing for the last 5 years or so, rooted in implementation science. It went insanely well, as you can see from this rather lovely video testimonial:

As you may be aware, there are exciting things happening in Wales at the moment. The Curriculum for Wales (CfW), which launched officially in September 2022, sets out a bold vision for the future of education, and they are going for it – big time. Many of the schools in the Making Change Stick pilot focused on learner effectiveness – growing great learners – which is central to the CfW, and stands in stark contrast to education policy in England for the last 12 years or so.

If you’d like to learn more about what’s happening in Wales, yesterday I released a brand new episode of the podcast with two amazing headteachers (and human beings) Cat Place and Ty Golding, in which we discuss the CfW at length. There’s a trailer below, and the full episode is available in video and audio here (or wherever you get your podcasts).

4. How do you solve a problem like Ofsted?

For the last 6 months or so, I’ve been working with a new group – the Education Policy Alliance – a kind of grass-roots think tank dedicated to creating an education system that promotes human flourishing. I think it’s fairly safe to say that Ofsted does not do this.

Our first consultation paper – How to you solve a problem like Ofsted? – is out now. If you would like to share your thoughts and help shape the future of school accountability, you can do so here – the consultation is open until July 31st.

5. Take part in research on student agency

What do approaches like oracy, collaborative decision making, project-based learning, learning-to-learn, and Philosophy for Children have in common? Why do they work so well in some contexts and not others? The answer may lie in our understanding of student agency.

Student agency is an essential part of the transformational change needed in education systems, according to the OECD and UNESCO. However, we know surprisingly little about student agency in the context of the English education system. The purpose of this research is to find out what students and their teachers think about student agency, as well as their experiences of agency and how this is supported by their educational environment.

This study is open to teachers / educators who work with young people between the ages of 11 and 16, at a school (or other educational setting) based in England. The researchers are particularly interested in hearing from educators who are already working in ways that support student agency.

If you would like to take part - or to find out more - please complete this form.

Participating teachers will be offered the chance to attend a free online training session to introduce the concept of agency. Attendees will be invited to reflect on their own practice through the lens of student agency.

Project title: Democracy and education – An exploration of student agency in the English secondary education system.

Conducted by: John Carden, Department for Education and Social Work, University of Sussex.

OK mis amigos, that’s all for now. Until the next time…

James x