Best Practice

Exactly how should we be assessing oracy skills?

Oracy education Pupil Attainment & Progress
As the push to place oracy teaching and education at the heart of our curriculum gathers pace, Dorothy Lepkowska attended the recent Voice 21 Oracy Summit to hear about how we might go about assessing this vital skill
Curriculum hope: The Voice 21 Oracy Summit heard that oracy education will feature in the final report of the Curriculum and Assessment Review even though it did not get one mention in its interim report - Adobe Stock

Everyone is talking about oracy. The final report of the Oracy Education Commission, published during the autumn term, recommended the introduction of oracy as the fourth R and called for it to be integrated into every curriculum subject.

Since then much has been written and discussed about how we can, and should, teach oracy and encourage speaking skills in the classroom and across the school – not least in SecEd.

Oracy campaigners are now hopeful that the government’s on-going Curriculum and Assessment Review will go some way to putting oracy front and centre in the curriculum – even though its interim report in March did not make specific mention of oracy skills.

In was in this context that national oracy education charity Voice 21 hosted its Speaking Summit in London to examine some of the issues around oracy teaching and assessment.

One of the aims of the event was to create further consensus around what good oracy education looks like. Unsurprisingly, the interim report was a key topic of conversation.

Ahead of the event, Voice 21 had called the omission of oracy from the interim report “baffling”, but there was reassurance on the day when Geoff Barton – chair of the Oracy Education Commission – told delegates that in a conversation with Professor Becky Francis, the chair of the Curriculum and Assessment Review, he had been reassured that oracy would be “woven into the final report”.

Mr Barton added: “It’s fair to say that we have seen, particularly from some parts of the press, an attack on (oracy education) and the suggestion that this is dumbing down education. What we say is, it really isn’t. It’s doubling up. What you are doing is making teaching more joyful, more effective, and learning for young people more inclusive.”

Dr Kate Paradine, CEO of Voice 21, said: “As well as being key to learning across all subjects, oracy education supports young people to become confident communicators and active listeners, to build relationships and connect with the world around them.

“We need an education system that enables every child to use their voice to thrive in school, work and life. One that will create an ‘oracy generation’ with the oracy skills and confidence to shape the future. Theirs and ours.”

Teacher Tapp polling released by Voice 21 ahead of the Speaking Summit revealed that half of school leaders now say that oracy is one of their top priorities for the coming school year, while more than 1 in 10 schools now have a dedicated oracy lead.

The Voice 21 event took place on the same day that SecEd published its 21-page oracy education supplement, including notable contributions from Voice 21 experts, case study schools, and Mr Barton himself.

However, one elephant in the room is assessment. As Baroness Morris of Yardley – education secretary in 2001/02 under Tony Blair’s government – told the event, teachers must accept that if oracy is to be given status in the curriculum, then this will have to come alongside assessment and accountability.

She urged campaigners and teachers not to shy away from difficult discussions with ministers – even though this might mean having to compromise about the assessment of oracy.

She said: “If all you say to government is that we want oracy to be part of the national curriculum, I know what will follow. The political part of education means they will have to show value for money, they will have to measure progress, and they will have to be able to assess it.”

 

How to assess oracy skills?

One key question is how should oracy be assessed? Are we talking high or low-stakes testing? What exactly would we be testing and for what purpose? What would teachers do with the information? It also begs the question, what sort of speaking would we want to assess: public speaking or in-class discussions?

The Oracy Education Commission’s report – We need to talk – found that, unlike reading and mathematics, there was currently no efficient or reliable system for tracking children’s progress in speaking beyond the early years.

It states: “Most teachers lack tools for the diagnostic, supportive and formative assessment of oracy. Teachers are not resourced to appraise progress in oracy and use this understanding to adapt and inform planning.”

And it warned that this “lack of testing disproportionately impacts children with undiagnosed speech, language and communication needs”.

As part of the event, a panel of experts was convened to talk all things oracy assessment. The panellists all came at the challenge from different perspectives – Professor Neil Mercer, director of Oracy Cambridge, said that oracy assessment should be a diagnostic tool to inform the learner and the teacher what the student was good at – and where they needed to improve.

“You’ve got to know what you’re doing it for and that will affect how we assess oracy, and what methods we use,” he said.

“Do we want to give them a certificate saying how good they are at it, or do we want them to know that they’re great at speaking publicly but not so good in a group discussion? Or perhaps they are really good at listening. How are we going to feedback to an 11-year-old on what they need to improve?”

He said that assessing speaking had to be contextual, with thought given to the reason and purpose of the assessment: “Oracy assessment is not this big round thing, it has a lot of aspects to it – not least what we mean by oracy.”

Prof Mercer accepts that for oracy to have a higher status in the curriculum then assessment needs to be part of that: “It’s an unfortunate truth that unless something is assessed it tends to get pushed out of the curriculum. So, although I’m not fan of testing, as a teacher you’ve got to justify your existence by getting your student to achieve good results.”

Meanwhile, Barbara Bleiman, a former English teacher and now education consultant with expertise in oracy, cautioned against assessing oracy like reading and writing, with checklists of what pupils should know or be able to do.

“There’s going to have to be a lot of work done with teachers in terms of professional development to ensure that it doesn’t become about itemised objectives or a tick-box exercise, and that form doesn’t take over from content – because there is a risk that that could happen,” she explained.

She said that clarity was needed on how to administer tests because there were potentially three ways of doing this – assessment of oracy, assessment through oracy, and assessment about oracy.

The first example would test speaking skills, the second might be used to test what students know about a particular subject, and the third would examine what they know about oracy including what spoken language is, how it is used, and aspects such as accents and dialects.

In SecEd’s recent oracy education supplement, Voice 21 expert Amanda Moorghen addressed the issue of assessment, advising schools that any approach must offer three things: reliability, validity and usability.

While we wait for the government to decide on what assessment might look like, she said that schools had to put in place formative approaches: “The purpose of these assessments is a formative one. School-based oracy assessments are seeking to understand students’ strengths and weaknesses with a view to informing teaching and learning and sharing information across the staff body.

“As a result, these assessments ought to be designed to inform teachers’ professional judgement – not to replace it. The reliability of the assessment will depend upon the extent to which you have established a shared language for discussing oracy and ‘what good sounds like’ in your school.”

Back at the Speaking Summit, Daisy Christodoulou, director of education at No More Marking, agreed that the assessment of oracy shouldn’t become reductive and recommended using comparative judgement because of its low-stakes approach. This involves comparing one piece of work against another to determine which one is better.

She continued: “We think there is value in this approach because oracy as a construct is poorly theorised compared to reading or writing. We’re trying to provide not just a useful tool for classroom teachers and students, but also to get an idea if there is agreement among teachers about what oracy is – if there is such a thing as good oracy.”

She said that marking schemes in reading or writing can feel “pernickety and reductive” leaving teachers looking at them like a tick list which “can lead to distortions”.

Ms Christodoulou recalled marking English essays during her time as a teacher: “One of these distortions, for example, is in the use of frontal adverbials. Pupils are taught that frontal adverbials add depth and have a list of these and think ‘I have to put one of these in’.

“But you can also read other pieces of work that are genuinely brilliant and creative but don’t have a frontal adverbial – or they misspell a difficult word and so can’t get a top mark. The incentive for pupils then is to use simpler vocabulary or something that’s easier to spell.

“I worry that we might see a similar approach with oracy where we end up with a very pedantic list of requirements that would end-up driving the wrong kind of approach – where creative responses would be penalised. Comparative judgement would allow us to take a more holistic approach to the assessment.”

Paul Steer, head of policy and public affairs at awarding body OCR, warned against rushing into assessment and getting it wrong: “When we talk about the purpose of assessment it should primarily be about supporting a young person to learn and to improve,” he said. “We’re really looking at a kind of continuum of different assessment at different points to see how pupils are progressing and then doing something with that information.

“What would concern me is that we come up with some sort of oracy assessment in GCSE English that might tick a box in terms of policy, because we’ve managed to get it into the curriculum, and that it leads to a high-stakes outcome.”

He added: “Even if we’re not assessing oracy we need to be teaching through oracy and it’s important to see this in curriculum areas such as maths, where students can be encouraged to talk though a problem.”

 

Further information & resources