"Why would a school leader want Minivox? A deputy head answers."

Tom Cragg is a deputy headteacher in [area], a former [role] at ProgressTeaching, and has advised Minivox on how schools buy and use it. [If Tom is paid for that work by the time this publishes, say so here in one line.] This is an edited conversation with Stevan Parkin.

Why would you want to use Minivox in your school?

Start with why oracy, and why now. The Curriculum and Assessment Review gives oracy its own section. The government has committed to a national oracy framework. And from September 2028 the refreshed national curriculum, which is statutory for every state school, academies included, makes spoken language more prominent in English. The framework itself is guidance rather than law, but it is what you will be expected to be working towards, and the question you will be asked is the one you are already asked about reading: how do you know your pupils are getting better at it?

The evidence is there. The EEF puts oral language approaches at around six months’ additional progress, on a very large evidence base, at very low cost. NFER projects communication as the most in-demand skill employers will want by 2035. Speaking is the thing most of us do most in working life, and in schools it has been the poor relation.

And it is not a subject. That is the mistake I see most. Oracy is a skill that runs through every subject, and that is exactly how Minivox works: any teacher, any lesson, set a spoken task.

Who is it for, in your school?

The pupils who struggle most, which are the pupils you are inspected on. Every school has the dyslexic boy who can give you two brilliant paragraphs out loud and puts his head on the desk when you hand him a pen. I had a boy obsessed with Flight Simulator who finally wanted to share his English work because he could talk it rather than write it. Give those children a way to show what they know and you have done something for your inclusion picture that no intervention booklet does. For me that is the biggest thing. Not a bolt-on, the job.

What does it do for your teachers?

It is homework for the twenty-first century. Most homework is still a booklet or an upload to a classroom platform. This gives children something they actually want to do at home, and the work does not die in a markbook. It is heard, it gets shared with the class, it gets celebrated.

And it drafts the marking for you to approve. A pupil records two minutes, the platform drafts a first response against the task, the teacher hears the work, changes what needs changing and approves it. The teacher’s judgment is final; what goes is the admin. For a teacher that is workload saved, not workload added.

Does it stay in English, or in homework?

No, and it should not. Homework is the door because it changes nothing about the timetable. But the same thing works in a lesson, in PE where the captain briefs the team, in drama, in music, in clubs, in careers, where a mock interview answer recorded and heard back is worth more than a worksheet. The Department for Education’s Enrichment Framework now names arts, sport, nature, civic life and life skills as part of the picture of a school, and Ofsted looks at them under Personal Development. Most of that runs on talk. Once a school has the habit of setting spoken work and keeping it, it runs through the day.

What I would want next, as a trust lead, is the schools in a trust sharing the tasks that work, so a good task set in one school is a click away in the others. [That is on the Minivox roadmap, not built today. Tom knows that; the sentence is his ask, not a claim.]

What about safeguarding? That is the first thing a head will ask.

It is a closed space. There is no public feed, no strangers, no likes, no comments, no algorithm deciding what gets seen. Nothing a child submits is visible to anyone until their teacher has heard it and approved it. A child can keep a piece of work between themselves and their teacher. Those are design decisions, not settings, and they are the opposite of the platforms we spend our time worrying about.

And for you as a leader?

The one-page picture. Headline numbers, then the detail: which classes are doing spoken work, how often, and whether the same pupil is getting better from September to July. No school has had that for talk before. We have had it for writing for a hundred years.

What happens when the framework is published?

I would expect Minivox to have it mapped within weeks, and I would want a school to be able to see progress against it the way it sees progress against the reading framework. If the tool does that, the 2028 question answers itself.

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Minivox is a closed, safeguarding-first platform where pupils complete spoken and creative tasks set by their teachers, get feedback on them, and keep the work so progress can be seen over time. No likes, no algorithm, no strangers. Built in Sheffield for UK schools.

Sources for the policy and evidence claims above: Curriculum and Assessment Review final report (Oracy section from page 43); the government’s response; EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit, oral language interventions; NFER, The Skills Imperative 2035; DfE Enrichment Framework.