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Given the fact that children in the lowest income group go to school with language skills 19 months on average behind their wealthier peers, which is not surprising the oration committee calls for oral language to be prioritized as the fourth ‘R’, alongside reading, writing and arithmetic.
But for speaking skills education to work at scale, the government must put evidence and impact at the heart of its implementation, and draw insights from the experience of the organizations that have put speaking skills on the national agenda.
Despite evidence of its benefits, oration has suffered from a lack of consensus about what it is, what it means and how it can be delivered. The committee’s work fills these gaps and provides a shared definition of oratory, a picture of what good looks like, and a blueprint for how it can be implemented.
But what does well-delivered oration look like, and can it be delivered on a large scale?
At Impetus we find, build and finance organizations that deliver the best proven interventions to support young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Oracy interventions have been found to add six months of additional study progress over the course of a year, while pupils those with higher language skills are more likely to achieve crucial GCSEs in English and maths.
This is why we have supported national charity Voice 21 for the past five years.
Through our partnership, we have provided them with unrestricted long-term financing for sustainable growth, complemented by practical, intensive support from our team. With Voice 21 we have been there every step of the way: refining their theory of change, helping shape the organizational strategy and being a critical friend and partner.
Vote 21’s Express vocabulary project evaluated the impact of a speaking approach on vocabulary development, monitoring students’ progress in reading in 12 schools in England.
At the start of the project, only 19 percent of students achieved above-average reading scores. After the implementation of oral interventions, this figure rose to 28 percent – five points above the national average.
Government must go beyond a superficial understanding of what works
After more than 20 years of working directly with organizations to scale their impact in this way, we know that achieving lasting change is not easy. As the government considers how to translate verbal statements of policy into practice, it should learn lessons from the schools and organizations that are already doing this well.
The first step is to define what “good” looks like, which provides a framework for broader implementation. Vote 21’s inaugural benchmarks are used to accredit their ‘Centres of Excellence’, with 44 schools accredited to date.
The next step towards national rollout is to promote evidence-based approaches to oral judgments that can be scaled up. This is one of the OEC’s recommendations and an important aspect of Voice 21’s growing public affairs function.
Of course, what works for one organization cannot always be perfectly replicated at the national level.
As a founding partner of the National Tutoring Program, we saw its success undermined by a focus on headline reach rather than impact. Reaching as many people as possible is a noble and sensible goal, but we believe that the deeper and more meaningful the impact, the better.
While working with Magic Breakfast from 2015 to 2021, we supported them in securing a government tender for what would become the National School Breakfast Programme, supporting breakfast provision in 1,770 schools across England.
The fact that the program reached around 375,000 children per day proves that it is possible to roll out impactful interventions nationally. But the recent focus on breakfast neglects the learning support element of the program that made it such a success.
To implement an intervention well and with impact, government must go beyond a superficial understanding of what works.
Earlier this year we learned from our work with Voice 21 called about the new government to “build the necessary infrastructure for fluency education for all”. The Committee on Oratory has taken the first step with their blueprint for a national right to oratory. But as we focus on implementation, we would urge the government to learn from our experiences.
Against the backdrop of a tight budgetary environment, with an autumn statement packed with tough decisions aimed at filling a £40 billion ‘budget black hole’, Oration feels like a rarity: a low-cost, high-impact intervention with the potential to bring about transformative change for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.
What we still need to do is ensure that it is not all talk and no action.