Six months' progress for almost nothing. What the EEF evidence says, and what it does not

If you want one number to take into a senior leadership meeting about oracy, it is this: the Education Endowment Foundation rates oral language approaches as worth around six months’ additional progress, on extensive evidence, at very low cost.

That is the EEF’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit strand on oral language interventions, updated in May 2025 and now drawing on 188 studies. The approaches it covers are the ones that emphasise spoken language and verbal interaction in the classroom: structured talk, discussion, explaining reasoning aloud, reading aloud and discussing what was read, and giving pupils feedback on how they speak.

The impact is strongest where talk is most of the day. The technical appendix puts it at around seven months in the early years, six in primary and five in secondary, with far more studies in early years and primary. If you lead a primary school, this is the evidence for making talk central rather than incidental.

Now the honest part, because an informed head will ask. The six months is evidence for the teaching, not for any product. No tool “delivers” six months’ progress. What the evidence says is that classrooms where pupils talk in structured ways, get feedback on it, and do it often, make more progress. Anything a school buys should be judged on whether it makes that kind of teaching easier to run, easier to keep and easier to see, not on a number borrowed from the EEF.

That is the test we set ourselves. Does it make it easier for a teacher to set a spoken task in any subject? Does it keep the work so progress can be seen over time? Does it give pupils feedback they can act on, with the teacher’s judgment in charge? If the answer to those is yes, the EEF evidence tells you the teaching behind it works. If the answer is no, the number does not apply.

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Sources: EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit, oral language interventions, and its technical appendix.