Oracy in state schools

What do you think his a curriculum for the digital age means?

Mollygo

What do you think his a curriculum for the digital age means?

The curriculum for the digital age should already be in place and embedded in all subjects.
I used to run a Digital Literacy project in my LA twenty years ago, perhaps they will rediscover that?
I might be persuaded out of retirement. 😂😂😂 (perhaps not).

Children only spend part of their day in nursery. Like reading it is up to parents to talk to them and read to them as well in there time together- and those are effectively the same thing.

In the 1970s, my MiL, a reception class teacher, used to talk about children who started school, having been talked at, talked over and talked through, but never having been talked to, and, as a result their vocabulary and comprehension of anything said to them was very low. Children are going to find it difficult to learn to read, if they haven't been talked to and got a basic vocabulary.

I think where effort and money needs to go first is in pre-maternal and mother and baby services, so that parents know and understand the importance of talking to their children, singing to their children and just looking at books and talking about them to their children, not reading them necessarily, just talking about pictures.

Yes, there will be families so disorganised and failing that they cannot handle this, in which case health visitors and their like should be identifying these children and getting them into nursery as soon as possible so that they can learn these essential skills then.

Adding oracy(what a silly word) verbal communication skills to the school curriculum, is a waste of time and money, if you haven't made sure that children have developed the neural pathways in infancy. If a child is born with sight or hearing problems, you do not wait to remedy and help the child until they reach school age, you help them from birth.

The same approach is necessary for developing verbal communication skills.

Very good point M0nica

Quite so, MOnica. Acquiring a vocabulary and using it are skills to be developed at home in the earliest years and it's true that many very young mothers have never been told the importance of this. Bring back Surestart.
Repeating the old-fashioned nursery rhymes can start before the age of 2. Many public libraries offer rhyme time or similar sessions and usu have ranges of quality books. School is for gaining confidence in reading aloud in front of others and learning to speak assertiveness.

Bring back Surestart

It hasn't disappeared entirely so could be expanded.

I agree entirely about putting support into the earliest years, but I would say that there is more to oracy than that MOnica. As has been said many times on the thread, speaking and listening has been a key part of the National Curriculum for many years.
Oracy is not just about elocution or performance or debate or reading aloud, as has been suggested by other posters.
It should be about developing confidence in speaking in a range of contexts for a variety of audiences. It should also be about active listening, processing, responding and developing effective communication skills in an oral / aural context.

I hope they put money into speech therapy then, which I think is impossible to get these days. My son had terrible speech problems for years and I still don’t know why. On the advice of his speech therapist he went to nursery ( they weren’t as good as they are now) ) and he hated it. Even when he was older he often spoke through me. His friends could understand him and when he started at primary school his teacher relied on his friends to translate. It used to break my heart seeing him in situations in which it was obvious that people didn’t understand him. Strangely enough, as he got older his voice was much clearer in the phone and by the time he went to uni he was fine.As for me, I was so shy that, if I’d had to speak at school I think I would have been scared to go to school.

Surely this should begin in the home with parents speaking with and listening to their children?

Re nursery vs. staying at home as regards oral skills, TBH I should imagine a lot of children will do better in that respect at nursery, where (presumably) staff won’t be glued to their phones. Whereas I suspect that in many cases at home…

My elder Gdcs attended nursery from 9 or 12 months and were all chatterboxes, talking 19 to the dozen once their speech ‘exploded’ shortly after 2.
The youngest (3.5) still goes, and if anything talks even more than the other two ever did.

Maybe one way to engage parent in encouraging their children’s Oracy or speaking skills, would be to have a banded scheme similar to a reading scheme so parents can see where their children are in terms of speaking levels.
Parents may not understand that when their child is asked, “What did you do at the weekend?” The child answers, “park” or “go park” or “I go park.” Instead of “I went to the park” or “ I went to the park with Daddy.”
Most children starting school can string together a 3, 4 or 5 word sentence with the correct tense of verb, but a frighteningly increasing number are either non-verbal (sometimes shyness, we watch them communicating with other children) or answer in 1, 2 or 3 words, often in the present tense. That’s happening more often rather than the problems with enunciation that we used to get.

My 2 year old grandson is very pleased to announce that he’s going to the pub with his daddy.
It’s not what it seems….

ronib

My 2 year old grandson is very pleased to announce that he’s going to the pub with his daddy.
It’s not what it seems….

My children wrote news about Daddy is out at the pubs or a club every night.
That wasn’t what it seemed either.

Not all parents are glued to their phones - I dislike this negativity towards today’s parents. Nurseries are not the be all and end all. And pre-school children can gain a lot from being cared for by grandparents and childminders where they receive more individual attention. It’s not a competition!

Not all parents are glued to their phones - I dislike this negativity towards today’s parents.
So do I. It's lazy and inaccurate. And if we're generalising, it's not as though previous generations spent ages talking to their children - we hear a lot about how children used to be outside playing for hours, and when they were indoors it was common for them to be expected to be quiet whilst the adults talked, or keep out of the way whilst the mum got on with the housework.

In the past children also learnt a lot by talking to each other, even if they did not talk much to adults, and I do wonder whether now where children are on screens a lot, that it is that that is affecting their communication skills.

I do remember, a couple of years back, when eating out, watching a family at another table. parents, boy c12 years and a grandmother. They all sat down and did quick checks on their phones and then sat there for 45 minutes and the only words they said to each other were when the waiter took their order.

At our table, 2 parents, grandparents and 2 children, we were talking non-stop, except that I was somewhat abstracted watching the silence of this other family.

nightowl

Not all parents are glued to their phones - I dislike this negativity towards today’s parents. Nurseries are not the be all and end all. And pre-school children can gain a lot from being cared for by grandparents and childminders where they receive more individual attention. It’s not a competition!

It’s not all parents that are bad, but a significant number are failing badly, nurseries and schools can only do so much if they are not supported by parents.
There should be much more remedial action for failing children but at the end of the day it’s easier for schools to let it go and move on, until the next time.

So it seems that Aristotle had it back in the day.

Rhetoric made of of three components. Pathos, ethos and logos

The way to go!!

Taking us back to the Rory Stewart lecture

www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCSlNrI4nhY

Yes🙂 I thought that oracy must surely be about these three components which Stewart shows in spades.

nightowl

Not all parents are glued to their phones - I dislike this negativity towards today’s parents. Nurseries are not the be all and end all. And pre-school children can gain a lot from being cared for by grandparents and childminders where they receive more individual attention. It’s not a competition!

I wasn’t suggesting that it’s all parents. Nor do I think that nurseries are the be all and end all. Except for a couple of hours at a playgroup my two were at home with me all the time until they started school, so I don’t mind admitting I was a bit dubious when dd put her eldest into nursery at 9 months - the 2 younger have followed suit at 9 or 12 months.

But I’ve complete changed my ideas - they’ve all thrived and been very happy. They’ve enjoyed facilities it’d be hard to provide at home, not just indoors - so many different activities, and also e.g. forest school.

Now that house prices are so high, especially in the SE, many parents who’d never have needed to a generation or so ago, simply do have to work to pay the mortgage and other bills - one salary so often just isn’t enough any more. Personally I think I was very fortunate to be able to stay at home with mine - I enjoyed that time with them when they were so little.

Presumably the parents being complained about for being non-stop on their phones are not at work though? How else would they be pushing little ones around in the daytime? Also, there are plenty of children from families who have had nobody in work for generations. I don't understand this correlation between having a parent around all day and achievement or even engagement with young children. It is clear that in general children from deprived families do worse than those with better incomes.

We've said all this before - being on the phone could mean anything. Chatting to a friend, trying to get an appointment for a sick child to see a doctor, arranging a business deal, booking the car in for a service - it is impossible to tell from walking past someone on the street.

Doodledog I don't understand this correlation between having a parent around all day and achievement or even engagement with young children. It is clear that in general children from deprived families do worse than those with better incomes.

Interesting.

Is there data to support that 'in general' notion?

Our children did well, regardless of low income.

It’s lack of communication starting in the early years that contributes to poor speaking and listening skills. It doesn’t matter whether you don’t chat to your child because you’re on your device, reading a book, watching TV or anything else. Even learning to read is doubly difficult if you’ve never used/heard the words you are trying to read.

Norah

Doodledog I don't understand this correlation between having a parent around all day and achievement or even engagement with young children. It is clear that in general children from deprived families do worse than those with better incomes.

Interesting.

Is there data to support that 'in general' notion?

Our children did well, regardless of low income.

Yes, lots of data. Sure Start was set up to mitigate the problems, and was doing well until it was stopped.

Like all generalisations there are lots of exceptions - of course there are. On the whole though, there are proven links between poverty and underachievement.