What the Curriculum Review actually says about oracy, and what it does not

There is a lot of loose talk in staffrooms and on LinkedIn about oracy becoming compulsory. Some of it is right and some of it is not, and if you are planning for 2028 you need the accurate version.

Here is what is true. The Curriculum and Assessment Review, published in November 2025, gives oracy its own section. It treats speaking, listening and communication as one of five applied areas that drew the most attention from young people, parents and everyone else who responded, alongside financial, digital and media literacy and climate education. The government’s response commits to a new national oracy framework, sitting alongside the existing frameworks for reading and writing. And the refreshed national curriculum, first taught from September 2028, makes spoken language more prominent in English.

Here is what is not true. The oracy framework is not statutory. Like the reading and writing frameworks it joins, it is guidance. What is statutory from 2028 is the curriculum itself, and spoken language is in it.

Does the difference matter? For your planning, yes. Nobody is going to inspect you against the framework as a legal document. But spoken language is about to be a more visible part of the curriculum every school teaches, the framework is what you will be expected to be working towards in practice, and the question any leader will be asked is the same one asked about reading: how do you know your pupils are getting better at it?

That question is the one most schools cannot yet answer. The Review itself cites the sector’s own Oracy Education Commission on the lack of a clear progression model for spoken language. Most schools teach talk; very few can show what progress in talk looks like across a year, a key stage or a school.

That is where the work is between now and 2028. Not in deciding whether oracy matters, which the Review has settled, but in building a way to set spoken tasks, keep the work pupils produce, and see progress in it the way you already see progress in writing.

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Sources: Curriculum and Assessment Review final report (Oracy section from page 43); the government’s response; the Oracy Education Commission, We Need to Talk (2024).