Oracy is the ability to articulate ideas, develop understanding and engage with others though spoken language.  

In school, oracy is a powerful tool for learning across the curriculum. By teaching students to become more effective speakers and listeners, we empower them to be able to communicate clearly, better understand themselves, each other and the world around them.  

At Ivydale, everyone is respected, included and each voice is valued. We support every member of our school to have the confidence and emotional intelligence to communicate effectively, build positive relationships and prepare for their next steps in life. We aim to develop and encourage fluent speakers, with rich vocabulary, who are confident to use their voices and ideas in a wide range of situations.    

Not only do we feel it is important to teach children to learn to talk and listen, we also believe that children learn effectively through talk and listening to the ideas of each other. We encourage talk in all our lessons to allow children to collaboratively discuss ideas, thoughts and judgements. Children take responsibility for their own learning through talk and discover new information in pairs, trios, circles, and a variety of other groupings.  

Children are taught how to be effective communicators through our embedded oracy curriculum which features skills such as storytelling, debating and presenting. Correct spoken language and the development of vocabulary is also fundamental to learning. 

Children are supported using a range of resources. Each class develop a set of discussion guidelines to ensure respectful and purposeful talk. We practise using talking sentence stems as well as talk tactics, which give children the idea of roles within a discussion- instigator, clarifier, prober, challenger, builder and summariser. Teachers model and mark effective communication and give specific feedback for children to practise.