‘Giving a child a voice is one of the most powerful tools we can give’ Dr Karyn Purvis

‘At Parkgate we aspire for our children to understand that their voice is important and can make a difference. We want them to listen well and be heard; to articulate their ideas clearly and express themselves with purpose.

We believe that Oracy will improve engagement in learning, foster confidence and well-being and promote social equity for all of the pupils in our school.’

As a staff, we recognise oracy as a golden thread running throughout all aspects of (school) life. It nurtures the ability to articulate ideas, develop understanding and engage with others through spoken language. With our children however, we have simplified this to:

‘Learning to talk, Learning though talk and Learning to listen’.

After a term of research, training with Voice 21 and staff development, the oracy framework was launched across school in January 2025. Through weekly whole school assemblies, children have learnt to define oracy; use talk tactics with sentence stems and actions to support classroom talk and explore the importance of listening.

As we move through the rest of this academic year, using our weekly assemblies, we plan to continue to teach the differing strands of the framework, including the importance of groupings, our language and vocabulary choices and how the skills of both exploratory talk and presentational talk can help us in our learning across the curriculum.

Below is an example of the Talk Tactics table topper which can be found in each classroom.