At Voice 21, we know that a school’s best intentions can stand or fall during implementation. Oracy education is complex and multi-faceted, and like anything worth doing in a school, needs to be implemented thoughtfully and as part of a sustained process of change.

The evidence base supports our understanding that the school’s staff and students need to sit at the centre of strategic planning: the EEF Implementation Toolkit (2024) explains that ‘Implementation is fundamentally a collaborative and social process driven by how people think, behave, and interact.’

So, how can you engage all staff in oracy implementation? Here are our three key suggestions:

Values-led implementation: make the case for oracy

A strategy is only as effective as those who make it a reality on a day-to-day basis: the teaching staff. Getting staff buy-in begins with a clear vision: explore the evidence base to ensure you understand the ways in which oracy can help meet the needs of your students, in your school.

As you develop your vision, consider how this can be communicated and even co-developed with staff and students across the school. What is their understanding of oracy? What have their experiences been so far, and what can oracy education help them to achieve?

Cultivate a culture of innovation and reflection

It can be tempting to try to do too much, too soon, from the top down. However, this is unlikely to succeed in the long run as it risks overwhelming the very people you are attempting to get on board. Further, it runs counter to the culture of reflection and pride in professional judgment that drives school improvement and professional development.

Instead, bring staff along on the journey. Cultivate their curiosity and motivate them to want to learn more by selecting thoughtful small steps – small amounts of information, strategies and approaches to try out – which teachers can experiment with in their own classrooms. Valuable CPD time can then be planned out to make space for discussion and reflection, allowing teachers to share what works for them, and why, and make suggestions for what should happen next.

Take a whole-school approach to oracy

At the start of the oracy journey, a common misconception is that oracy can be confined to the English classroom, solved by English teachers alone. But we know that oracy is disciplinary – speaking, listening and communicating underpin teaching and learning in every subject (and often access to co-curricular activities as well). Every teacher needs to be a teacher of oracy, because they need to induct students into subject-appropriate ways of speaking, listening and communicating.

This doesn’t mean that every teacher needs to go at the same pace. Consider developing a core ‘oracy team’ of enthusiastic pioneers who can lead the way – and make sure that they have the opportunity to share what they know and develop your whole-school strategy across subject areas.