A school leader told us recently that the mistake most schools make with oracy is to treat it as a subject: a slot on the timetable, a scheme, a lead. It is not a subject. It is a skill that runs through every subject, and that is how it has to be taught if it is going to stick.
Think about where talk already happens in a school day. A pupil explaining a method in maths. A pair arguing both sides of the Civil War in history. A Year 6 presenting a science investigation. A reluctant reader retelling a chapter. A PE lesson where the captain has to brief the team. A drama warm-up, a music performance, a careers conversation about what they want to do next. None of that is “oracy lessons”. All of it is oracy.
The Department for Education’s Enrichment Framework points the same way. It names arts, sport, nature, civic life and life skills as the five areas of enrichment, and from September 2026 Ofsted considers enrichment under Personal Development. Clubs, performances, competitions and trips are not extras any more. They are part of the picture of a school, and most of them run on talk.
So the question for a leader is not “where do we put oracy on the timetable”. It is “how do we see the talk that is already happening, across subjects and beyond the classroom, and how do we help it get better”.
Three things help. First, give teachers a simple way to set a spoken task inside any lesson, not just English. Second, keep what pupils produce, so a spoken answer is not gone the moment it ends. Third, give pupils a reason to do it that is not “because I said so”: an audience of their class and their teacher, and feedback they can act on.
Do that in a few subjects and the pattern becomes visible. The pupil who will not write a paragraph but can explain the whole thing out loud. The quiet one who finds a voice in a podcast task. The group that argues better in history than they ever did in a debate club. That is oracy as a skill, and it is already in your school. The job is to see it.
[positioning sentence]
Sources: DfE Enrichment Framework; Curriculum and Assessment Review.