The greatest failing of Britain’s schools is to teach children to read, write and count, but not to speak. They teach what technology can increasingly do for them, but not what it cannot. A regular complaint of today’s employers is that applicants for jobs lack social skills or work ethic.
Pupils are rarely taught how to present themselves, handle arguments or form human relationships. The most basic requirements for entering adulthood are ignored. The one task to which teaching is almost exclusively dedicated – examination – is an activity conducted in total silence. No grown-up job involves answering exam questions. Education only in the “three Rs” is akin to where medicine was in the days of bleeding and leeches.
The teaching of oracy, or the use of speech, was launched about 10 years ago by progressive educationists in an attempt to make schooling more relevant. A few charities have promoted it, such as Voice 21 and Impetus, and a few schools promised to teach it. Then, in 2024, came an independent commission on oracy, chaired by Geoff Barton of the Association of School and College Leaders. It reported that the revolution was overdue. Although the national curriculum for England includes the teaching of spoken language as part of English programmes, it is rarely emphasised or made prominent. Speaking ability, group working and class debating should have the same status as reading, literacy and numeracy. Oracy should be “the fourth R”.
Just before the commission, the then prime minister, Rishi Sunak, was still burbling about everyone doing maths until they were 18, as if calculators did not exist. But Keir Starmer grabbed the moment. He declared oracy was “not just a skill for learning, it’s also a skill for life … for working out who you are, for overcoming shyness or disaffection, anxiety or doubt … for opening up to our friends and family.” The Labour leader promised that teaching oracy would be a priority of a Labour government. He had got the point.
Or apparently not. Starmer’s remark was one of his familiar off-the-cuff moments. He never repeated the pledge. When the government’s interim curriculum and assessment review was published in March, the word oracy was absent. Instead there was rather a traditional emphasis on imparted knowledge, what Dickens satirised in Hard Times as filling “little pitchers” to the brim. On speaking, it was silent.
This week, Starmer was called to account. He received an open letter from oracy campaigners demanding he stick to his pledge. It was signed by former education secretaries Charles Clarke and Estelle Morris, writer Michael Rosen, political pundit Alastair Campbell and 56 other champions of the skill of speaking. The writers pleaded with Starmer: “In a world shaped by rapid advances in artificial intelligence, deepening social divides and persistent inequality, the skills of speaking, listening and communicating have never been more urgently needed.” Rosen, a professor of children’s literature, added that “the backbone of language is our talk. It’s the everyday way we make and change relationships, share the events of our lives, hear about other people’s lives.”
Young members of my family recently returned from school in California, where the essence of the new education is focused on performing and learning in groups. The teacher’s role is not to lecture but to guide discussion. This is already being tested in British universities, such as Reading and Bath. I imagine it is anathema to Ofsted as it cannot be measured. When I suggested it, a teacher replied: “Oh, you just want all schools to be like The Apprentice.”
The essence of oracy is helping pupils articulate their thoughts to others, to listen and reply with courtesy and intelligence. Pupils at Winchester College used to start each day with a topical class discussion. All schools should do that. The nearest most children might get to hearing a public debate is witnessing idiot shrieking at prime minister’s questions. When I watch the pupils leaving my local comprehensive, they don’t converse. They look at their phones or they shout. As Jonathan Haidt has written, this is seriously bad news.
The resistance of Britain’s school system to change is near fanatical. It says in effect that if the three Rs were good enough for Queen Victoria, they must be good enough for children now. The system still loves maths – which is not needed by 95% of job-seekers – because it is easy to measure and for governments to boast about. Even literature is reduced to multiple-choice questions. Every classroom minute must become a statistic and a league table.
Everything we now hear about the teenage young is causing alarm. Mental illness is soaring. So are absenteeism and, worst of all, un-employability. The world of work is irrelevant. School teaching appears trapped in a professional archaism that forbids reform. Class instruction, academic bias, length of terms and exam obsession are immutable. Parents and even pupils responded to the recent curriculum review by pleading for subjects such as “financial education, careers knowledge, and politics and governance”. The pleas were ignored. There will be no GCSEs in the world outside the school gates.
As for Starmer, he is more interested in getting 16-year-olds to vote for him than in giving them a modern education. If he was a true radical, he would honour his pledge and get them talking.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
