Public speaking: the case for teaching oracy

How many times, since leaving school, have you needed to know what an oxbow lake is, asked Daniel Hannan in The Telegraph. “When did you last write out the periodic table, or conjugate a Latin verb?”

I bet, though, that you have had to make speeches: “presentations at work, suitable words at birthdays, pep talks to a team”. It’s odd, then, that you were almost certainly never taught public speaking in the way you were taught geography or maths. Lucy Powell, the new education secretary, now wants to give “oracy”, to use the “ugly” 1960s term, “the same status as reading and writing” in England.

‘Aversion’ to speech

Traditionalists don’t like the plan – but they ought to. For centuries, rhetoric was a central part of classical education. Computers and AI have made much of the knowledge in the curriculum less important than it was. More useful now is knowing how to sift through information, to present arguments, to engage people, to disagree constructively. “Oracy, if we must call it that, does these things.”

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Traditional British education certainly has an “aversion to the spoken word”, said Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. Worse still, today “speaking itself is going out of fashion”. Technology is distancing young people from adults and from each other. Studies suggest that in the past two decades, the number of words people say each day has shrunk by nearly a third. A quarter of young people “never even answer the phone unless pre-arranged”. Powell’s plan to teach children “to use the spoken word to their advantage” is long overdue.

‘Positive strides’

Andy Burnham’s government seems determined to “rethink” education policy, said The Times. The danger is that the “positive strides that have been made over the past decade” will be undone. From 2010, Michael Gove fought an all-out war against many in the profession to push a traditional, knowledge-rich curriculum. The results have been very impressive. According to the OECD’s Pisa rankings, England now ranks in the world’s top 10 for reading, maths and science – while Scotland and Wales have seen their performance drop significantly.

It’s true, though, that oracy has been overlooked, said Kristina Murkett in The Spectator. For GCSE English language, there is one box-ticking exercise called the “Spoken Language Endorsement”, based on a single presentation. In other humanities, there is no oracy element at all. The danger is that the oracy drive could lead in a dumbed-down direction – away from deep knowledge and longer texts. It’s also unclear how it would be assessed. Powell will have to iron out these issues if oracy is to be more than just another “pedagogical buzzword”.