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Bedrock Talks from Bedrock Learning
Welcome to Bedrock Talks, a podcast from the team at Bedrock Learning that delves deep into the heart of literacy in education. Hosted by the insightful and experienced educator Andy Sammons, this podcast stands as a beacon for anyone passionate about enhancing literacy skills and understanding its pivotal role in education.
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Bedrock Talks from Bedrock Learning
23. Need for (more than) speed: fluency and oracy with Sarah Davies
Sarah Davies is the author of Talking about Oracy which focuses on the development of effective communication beyond the parameters of the classroom.
She is currently an Assistant Head Teacher at a secondary academy in the north-west of England. Alongside her teaching, she has also written articles for SecEd, The Headteacher and the Teaching Times, as well as presenting at regional and National ResearchEd and ReThinking education conferences.
In this episode, Sarah shares her thoughts on oracy, context switching and how learners can be better communicators.
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Speaker 1:I have to say I'm really happy with how it's gone this year. We have an assistant principal, an author, joining us. Today we've got sarah davies, who's assistant principal of a multi-academy trust and author of talking about oracy, um. Another one where reached out to sarah on x, I think it was um might have been linked in um, but having seen the launch of the book, having seen um people talking about the book and thinking actually this is a really powerful thing that we're doing. We speak a lot, funnily enough, about oracy in bedrock and the importance of actually speaking to schools, about intertwining that with with with our platform.
Speaker 1:I'm increasingly saying to people bedrock is amazing, but it's not a plug and play platform that stops with the kids being on a computer. It's about all of the organic conversations, all of the organic learning that happens around it. So I thought who better than the author of the book or um, talking about oracy, to get on to speak to me about that. So, sarah, thank you for coming on. Massively appreciate you creating space and time in your day today. I've been forewarned potentially a barking dog in the background, but the children will likely not disturb us. Is that right?
Speaker 2:Well, fingers crossed, it was one of those. I mean, the joys of summer holidays is because you change your roles slightly, and I did think to myself well, before I come on this podcast, you know what? I'll just refresh my mind because obviously I've been dealing with a five-year-old and instead I ended up watching an episode of Super.
Speaker 1:Potato.
Speaker 2:So, however this goes, hopefully we'll be able to have a really good discussion about it. Winging the prayers how?
Speaker 1:we like it. I mean it's funny because obviously mine are in kind of you know kind of one's at a football thing today and the other one was at a dance thing, but those things stop at three. So you still have to break your middle of the day off, pick them up. And this context switching thing is real. I feel so stressed, not like the kind of the difficulty of what I'm doing in any one different place, but having to switch, having to kind of do a really important email and then shout Wilf, get down off that fence. It's really hard to kind of.
Speaker 2:so you can imagine what he's been getting up to this afternoon oh, absolutely, and I think one of the things that I'll be talking about, probably in a bit more detail later, is the idea of cold switching, and I think I don't think we realize that we do this all of the time, and it's very much a case, isn't it, where, you know, at school I get a constant you know the mess being bounded by the corridors, and then I come home and it's it's mumming so it's very much the case of trying to find that middle ground, and I think it's important for all teachers to to kind of take a step back from it as well sometimes, because it can just absolutely drive you insane sometimes just going from one situation and scenario to another, where and it goes back to this idea of learning how we communicate with those different people as well- it's interesting I am.
Speaker 1:I.
Speaker 1:I worked at a school that was literally a stone's throw from my house, and one of the attractions to working at the school was that it was so close from my house, and one of the attractions to working at the school was that it was so close, but it it was.
Speaker 1:It was really difficult for me actually coming home sitting on the couch and still being absolutely buzzing from work and not, whereas when I have worked in places where it's more like a half an hour, 40 minute drive, I found that the I've been able to kind of manage that switch slightly, slightly more effectively. Um, and I think you're right, it's tough to balance those two. And so if we were to get a sense of you and your role, because when we spoke before, I remember being just I mean, we'll get onto all sorts of things in this conversation, but just so impressed about the scope of your knowledge around oracy and it being so much more than simply talking, and so I'd like to get a sense of what your role is and how it, how it has manifest that you have come to be so knowledgeable about all things oracy. So could you give us a sense of your role and how you've found yourself in this kind of space so my role is kind of twofold.
Speaker 2:I mean obviously. Obviously it's threefold as well because I am an English specialist. So that has always been my passion, that's always. It's what drove me into teaching Very much more literature focused than language focused. However, language is obviously the element of it that I picked up along the way.
Speaker 2:Um, then, when I became assistant head teacher, I took on a lot of, uh, the responsibilities around the early careers framework, but also, um, the the fluency and recognizing as part of the fluency lead. Now, what's quite interesting about the idea of a fluency lead? It goes back to this you know, you'll seen a lot of transition in schools recently, this buzzword of the time of fluency in general. I think what we've got to be aware of is schools not making, or establishments not making the errors of kind of just transferring a literacy role to a fluency role, because actually we need to really unpick what this word fluency actually means, because a common misconception for someone would be to turn around and go.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm fluency lead because I lead on literacy, and actually it's not, because fluency is this idea of a development of the automaticity. It's about confidence and a fluidity that derives from not just the literacy elements of it but also your oracy and your writing skills as well. So, you know, this is what's really allowed me to take that passion for oracy and put it into a new layer, because, you know, not only am I an avid reader and absolutely, you know, an advocate for improving our students' literacy abilities and opportunities as well. But when I really dig down deep into that idea of opportunities, we have to look at the roots of that, and the roots of that come from the oracy skills. I mean just, we talk about um in 2013.
Speaker 2:For example, michael gove um, you may remember um, but what he said that well you, but what he said, that, well, this is it, and then we're still living um with elements of that as well, like you know. For example, the english speaking listening component.
Speaker 1:I'm still scarred you're scared. I'm the one that's still doing the video being posted off to exam boards.
Speaker 2:Don't absolutely and reiterating to the students that, yes, they do mean something, when, in essence, it's like telling my child that you know if he's naughty for, however, christmas isn't gonna come. Um, it's very much that idea of, and it's shocking to even say that it's so, so insulted. I feel like it's so insulting to my profession, but what he said was in 2013. He actually said that children don't well, they they naturally learn to talk, but they don't naturally learn to read. So his idea was well, actually, we need to focus all of this idea on literacy, because their oracy skills are already embedded and are already there. And you know, I was absolutely furious about this, and it did quite rightly so, cause absolute uproar, and I still am to this day.
Speaker 2:And oracy is something that needs to be trained and it needs to be developed and, over time, of kind of looking into things in more detail. I mean, I mentioned that because there are elements of it that are true in a way. Now let me just kind of reiterate what I mean by that, because there is a natural idea of communication. You know, one of the that that we've got quite into in the Davies household is the uh, the Netflix natural planet thing. I think it's Morgan Freeman's voice just really soothes me, and just listening to him to talk, to talk about, you know, the animal planet and where we came from and life on our planet and everything else like that has fascinated me. And one thing that I've noticed is that every single species communicates in some way, shape or form. So actually there is an element of that. There is a natural form of communication.
Speaker 1:No, it would not sound like it does today if we're talking about early communication, if we're talking about really early communication, but the basis of this is that, yes, they learn to naturally talk, but we need to support them to talk well and that, and that's what I really wanted to kind of get to with you here was because you I mean, I'll be honest with you, I'll be honest with the listeners, I, I I'll openly disclose that oracy, um and or fluency I just saw as reading, fluency, reading, reading quickly, and that's it. Oracy, um and or fluency I just saw as reading, fluency, reading, reading, quickly, and that's it, oracy, talking. But actually correct me if I'm wrong, but what you're advocating for here is fluency being almost in the middle of this three-way venn diagram between, and it sits in the middle of oracy, reading and writing. So fluency is in the middle fluency, and it's interesting.
Speaker 1:Actually I know it's a slightly different point, but I spoke to elizabeth draper yesterday, who works with the english association, and we had a bit of a to and back and forth about reading for pleasure and I I said I'm not comfortable with that term because I think it's a byproduct for other things, and she said, actually what it is is it's part of a holistic picture for what we should be looking for the literacy agenda in our schools. And I wonder if there's something similar here about fluency and schools needing to make that shift to fluency being the centre point between oracy, reading and writing. Would you agree with that? Have I got that right? Fluency in the middle.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, absolutely. And I think that's where the common misconceptions lie, isn't it? It's this idea of just regarding fluency as the ability to read. I mean, we go back to this idea of reading for pleasure In a way that slightly infuriates me. So when I'm talking about and when I'm considering fluency, what reading for pleasure actually is, you know I work in a mainstream, mainstream school with a high pupil, premium demographic and a high um. So, you know, is it a high send need as well?
Speaker 2:I'm not, overnight, going to transform our school into a scene from the von trapp children, you know, all walking around. Yes, I could get a book in their bag, but how many of those children will actually be then utilizing that book in the way that I want it to? You know how many? You know we could do drop everything and read, but how many students would be dropping everything and read? And that still doesn't make it reading for pleasure.
Speaker 2:As a child who had a bit of a, I just didn't like PE. Okay, I didn't, I didn't. I'm you know what, ironically enough, now I'm a trained kayaking instructor. I'm a trained climbing instructor. It turns out I didn't like that kind of sport, but actually that's a really good, you know starting point for it, because I used to do PE and yes, I might be having a laugh, but am I doing it for pleasure?
Speaker 2:You know, it's the same idea of the reading for pleasure concept and actually we need to turn our perception of what reading for pleasure actually is. And it is reading fluently, you know, are our students able to pick up a newspaper article? Are they able to scroll through and look at? You know any immediate news feeds that go on? Are they able to read those confidently and to be able to articulate what they say? And a lot of this is embedded within the reading profiles as well. Um, and you know, it's really about getting under the skin and the layers of what that terminology actually means. And you're quite right, fluency has to be at the heart of that. It's not, um, a skill within literacy, it's actually the, the overall isn't it really?
Speaker 2:yeah, it's been done properly and it's you know, just just looking at those reading profiles in more detail and I know that this is a big um. A big thing for me as well is the idea of what quite a lot of schools will do is go, yes, you know what we do uh, reading for pleasure. And we know our students reading ages and I keep thinking to myself that's fantastic. You know, your students reading age is absolutely amazing. You know standard five of the teaching standards. We adapt into the needs of our learners and we're making sure that everything's great. And then I'm thinking well, no, because it's still surface level, and what I mean by that is actually where those reading ages come from. And for me, it's all about developing profiles based on the fluency. It's about fluency profiles.
Speaker 2:Now, that's not just your reading profiles, that's your oracy profiles and your writing profiles as well. When we're talking about different profiles, for example the reading profile, you know you go back to the reading rope and this idea of the that there's a correlation between the word recognition and the language comprehension side of it, and what it's about is about really developing an understanding of yes, this student has got this reading aid, but where has it come from. So we look at elements like really drilling, digging deep into the stain ends that are involved. So one of the structures that we use and one of the testing systems that we use looks at passage comprehension and sentence completion and it's almost like you know, it takes the the weeding rope to the next level. So the sentence completion is obviously the toolkit, but the passage comprehension is what you make out of it. So it's what, what?
Speaker 2:you know what inferences are made, what, what summary is that is done? And it's about really unpicking those, because a student, could you know, at the age of 16, could have a reading age of 10. All right, that student has a reading age of 10, which means that we need to be putting those interventions in place, whether it be through the quality first teaching strategies that we're using and adopting, or whether it be for, you know, additional intervention that we're putting on on the sidelines, whether it be through the quality first teaching strategies that we're using and adopting, or whether it be through, you know, additional intervention that we're putting on on the sidelines, whether it be electronic it's one of those things, um.
Speaker 1:So we I've spoken to a lot of schools more recently about our bedrock reading test, funnily enough, which is um, which is developed based on the simple view of reading, and one of the things we talk about is, yes, schools will still get that safety net with with, with that test, for example, with our test of reading ages and standardized age scores, particularly reading ages. That schools still seem to like and that's an important, that's the important part of their plans and we respect that. But one thing we're spending lots of time talking about with schools is actually it's more about the profile of, of the sub skills that gets reported underneath. So I always say to schools actually, how powerful is it? You can go to your head of history and say this child is really poor, is performing really poorly at, you know, answering incorrectly items in our, in our um, in our kind of calibrated question bank of that. They're answering questions really poorly on textual summary. They're not able to pull evidence effect, you know, identify appropriate evidence from text. That's true curricular insight. That moves beyond.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm not being funny, but if a 16 year old's got a reading age of a 10 year old, that statistic on its own is not giving you any more than you already had, because you probably already knew they were, that they were. They weren't fluent, it never mind in reading, but in right, in probably speaking and probably right, or certainly, writing as well. So I think you're right. It's about diagnosing the whole picture. So, if we think about it as that whole picture, just tell me a little bit, because I want to get into the pedagogy a bit further on. But what do these profiles look like for your school? Because I know there will be leaders out there right now listening to this thinking right, this sounds great terms of a assistant principal, senior leadership, whole school level, where you are perhaps documenting, being able to share these profiles for your people's profiles in some way across the school so I think a big thing for me is is a collective understanding of what those profiles actually means, and that's you know.
Speaker 2:We are still, being completely honest, we are still in our infancy stage, you know. Is it effective implementation across the board? No, because actually we're still in that really understanding what. You know how to read a profile properly, and I'd rather be at that stage and be exploring the different opportunities for it than say, yeah, you know what, we absolutely do, everything that we, you know. That's the end goal, so to speak, and I think when you're looking at the reading profiles, it's all about really being able to look. And, yes, you might have two students that have got a reading age of 10.
Speaker 2:But why and what does that mean for how you're planning your lesson? What does that mean for what you need inside your lesson? So, for example, it's about reading and picking it. We talked about the Scarborough Reading Rope, for example.
Speaker 2:If I just, you know, if I just use that as a basis, you know you might find that you've got a student with a really high word recognition and a really low language comprehension.
Speaker 2:That student I mean probably 80% of the time that will be an EAL student.
Speaker 2:So that will be a student that is able to recognize all of the words but actually not being able to put it all together to create that comprehension. And that you know, there's your summaries, there's your inference, there's all of those, because what's not happening is that process and you know, I think that's where that fluency comes in. You know, there's a difference between being able to and this is where the whole version of fluency comes in because there's a difference between being able to to read a passage out loud perhaps, so you could read a passage out loud and then you know, a student that had a high word recognition would be able to read that passage out loud. But then if I was to ask that student um questions about that that passage, and if I was to make them inference or summative, led that student would struggle. Now, what we've got to take into consideration, and then we don't, and know that we do not want to be an assessment. You know, driven profession when we, that is not what we want for our profession.
Speaker 1:We want it to be evidence driven, but evidence led, which forms into the teaching and assessment. It's not about just one of those things, but all of them, isn't it?
Speaker 2:It's so important to recognise that. But what we have to do is we have to at least recognise where our students are then going to. You know that end assessment, that GCSE assessment or that SAT going to. You know that end assessment, that GCSE assessment or that SATS assessment. You know how are they going to perform in that assessment as a result of their reading profile and it is going to have a detrimental impact if the correct provision is not being put in place for that student.
Speaker 2:And it's not saying under any circumstance that we go back to this idea of you know 400 different worksheets in the classroom and you know everything's color coordinated for a particular reason that is still unknown to me, but I've still got all of my little. You know tools in that toolkit for it. It's not saying that in the slightest, but what it is saying is that if you had a class that had quite a high tariff of, say, the average you know on a nine, stay nine, say. The average for your class was, um, an eight for word recognition is a really similar. This is really good class an eight word recognition and a four or five for language comprehension.
Speaker 2:Of course you're going to be spending a lot more time on the really getting to grips of whatever text that you're looking at, whether it be in history, whether it be in geography, whether it be in maths, because actually, you know, even going back to this idea of you know going, and going back to oracy, because that's where I always live, um, you know, when the russians are quite high on the pisa levels, uh, for their maths they're one of the top scoring ones. And when asked why, they actually say it's because of their oracy skills, it's because it's ingrained within what they do. They teach them to articulate what they're finding, to be able to reason through it, and in order to do that, you've got to be able to comprehend it. And you know, look at the extent of the longer questions that we've got and those students that struggle with those longer questions, that's because that language comprehension has not been dealt with in the classroom setting.
Speaker 1:Do you envisage um, a you know in kind of, let's say, a a gold standard for you? You're looking at reading profiles which you can share and support your colleagues to interpret. Do you ever see a time where you might be able to have a writing profile?
Speaker 2:well it's. It's funny that you could, uh, you should say that because, like I said before, for me fluency you know, really adapting to those strengths and needs of all students is looking at all three profiles. If we're really going to say that that fluency encompasses all reading, writing and um, literacy, oracy and writing, then actually we need to have profile levels for all of them.
Speaker 2:So, for example, for oracy um, you know I'm very, very much an advocate of the work of voice 21 and oracy cambridge and I think their framework just really says it all, about understanding the difference between the linguistic, you know, the body language, the social and emotional side of it, the cognitive side of it. And, for me, teachers and anyone really, and it's, and it's not even the education profession, it's absolutely all professions and we know this from the level of communication that's going on, a level of communication training that's going on in areas like the NHS, for example, about how to actually be able to communicate with someone and get that message across properly. And for me, the oracy profile is in that same element. So it's about recognizing. You know, yes, I have this student in front of me, but how does this student react to things like being asked to look you in the face? You know there, are students.
Speaker 1:there are a lot of students Do you know, this is interesting because and it hits just you just you've just tweaked something in my, my memory. We were talking before about the speaking and listening. How many times do you get a powerpoint from a colleague, or from tests, or wherever it is, and it always starts with success criteria. Look your audience in the face and actually what happens is these really important component, core skills around communication are just reduced to a success criteria on one PowerPoint slide. And I make no apologies for saying this, but the number of young people who, particularly in recent years and I won't shy away from saying this, particularly in recent years you're talking to them about their behavior, you're trying to address something that's really not right, about what their choices have been. They don't look you in the eye Because they're obviously feeling not great about the conversation. I get that, but they don't want to look you in the eye, they don't want to engage in the conversation. That their body language is completely like I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm kind of closing up here and I. It's interesting. Actually there's a chap I was chatting to yesterday, uh, mike gardner, who's actually just about to start an oracy project of his own, and he said this particularly at a primary school level, these, you know it's so important to really infuse those golden threads like independence, like things like oracy, those things that you know we're talking about creating communicators and citizens truly for the 21st century. And that means in the ai age, where and all these different complexifying things that are going to be laid on top of today's young people when they enter the workplace and I mean our CEO, aaron, often talks about this. He doesn't he, he wants, he wants us to think not just about what we have in front of us now, but the classrooms of the future, the young people and the teachers of the future. That's what we need to strive for at Bedrock. Teachers of the future. That's what we need to strive for at bedrock.
Speaker 1:And it just you, what you said, that just just really reminded me about this idea of you know, looking someone in the face and speaking to them is so much more than something that's just on one side of a powerpoint. It's about, then, how that might transpose into an essay. I remember when the penny started to drop with me around writing effective essays. I knew I wasn wasn't talking to someone directly, but I had this visualization of my audience that I was speaking to in the essay, and that was a. It wasn't completely the same thing, but you know what I mean. There was a construct in my mind of who I was communicating to, and the more I'm talking you're nodding here, because the more I'm I'm sort of almost working out for myself. Now I feel like I'm working my way to where you are. I'm teaching myself here. You can did you know what I mean, though? I think that that and that's what the oracy is, isn't it?
Speaker 2:it's the counterpoint, it's everything and you know what's quite interesting about that one as well, like, like it's like you mentioned, about the idea of it being so much more than just a really basic success criteria and really building that oracy profile to, to understanding, to be able to look at a student and go. Well, you know, such and such a student struggles with the the body language side of it, so actually we need to work on that, because that articulation is there. What's quite interesting about that, though, you know, it just reminds me of something that I always I I always have in the back of my mind, and that's the Horowitz and Samuels research study of 2017 actually stated that you know those of a higher income families, for example, 32 million more words. You know student, you know students, children within those environments. And what's more terrifying about that and we go back to this idea of well, why don't students recognize this information? That was pre-COVID. So, when we're talking about, why are students of this day and age struggling with looking people in the face, it's because they spent a substantial amount of their child development time. And you know, going back to what I said earlier about how this idea of children naturally learn to talk, they do naturally learn to talk, but they don't necessarily naturally learn to communicate, and actually a massive element of that time has been spent looking at a screen, for example, or even not even communicating in slightest, because I know that a lot of schools, because of things like GDPR and issues like that, you know we communicated, but I didn't have mine on camera, so I know that my students still got that idea, but that what they didn't see is, you know, go back to the oracy profile. They saw one element of it, or they heard one element of it, which is my tongue and that is absolutely it. They didn't see any kind of facial expressions, they didn't see any features and it goes back to this idea of you know, even when doing podcast interviews or anything like that, I have significantly struggled with any interviews that I haven't been able to see the person on the upper end of it and and you know we talk about that that idea of nodding.
Speaker 2:Then you've got to be able to have this whole picture and we do have a a huge gap. We've done so much to bridge the gap for COVID. We've done so much and, honestly, the profession has worked so hard to really just drive forward and it goes back to what you just mentioned there about the breadwalk learning, knowing and understanding, creating that holistic idea of what we want for our students and what we want for our children. But then we ask ourselves, actually, have we really taken into consideration the communication development that has been lacking as a result of what's happened? We will have students that won't have communicated at all and we will have elements that won't have communicated. And I know that you know, last year, starmer, when he was talking about his five-point plan, he really understood that idea of bridging that demographic divide.
Speaker 2:Um in there, but it's, how is that going to be transposed? And this is, this is my book bear how is that going to be transposed into a very, you know, volatile educational system at the moment? That is very assessment driven, progress driven outcomes. You know, in schools like mine, I will, like you know, quite happily say I am an absolute. I've been an advocate for oracy and oracy strategies. But it has been a battle and that's for me what it has been a battle because actually, where is the explicit quantitative data that comes from it? And I can say well, actually I can give you loads of implicit, I can give you it for every single subject. I can give you how it affects outcomes. But if your school was really up against it or your setting was really up against the way we live with Progress, progress eight, it can be terrifying for leaders. We even think about doing something that, yes, we know looks at the whole picture but doesn't necessarily guide them towards that specific exam.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's um, you know it's the opportunity cost, isn't it? You know, if you go in and you you know senior leaders you'll know you only have so much to spend in terms of time and resource. And if you're going to do something like oracy, you've got to do it properly. You've got to invest the time, you've got to invest the cpd time and that's all time taken away from departments, from other school agendas, from various things, and it must be so tough to to have to to be brave enough to do that. I mean, we have it a little bit um with bedrock sometimes, in that I speak to schools a lot of the time about. Ironically enough, bedrock isn't just about the platform that the pupils do. It's about the insights that the teachers get back to then using their lessons. So therefore, try and give it some space in lesson time, maybe 20 minutes every couple of weeks or something like that, and it's just about helping facilitate that move to thinking bigger picture. You know thinking big, but that's hard and I'm sat here in my ivory tower thinking about these things and actually, you know I really empathize with leaders because I've seen it myself. You know where you're grappling with so many issues around the table.
Speaker 1:When I was leading English in my school, you know people would say why aren't we doing this with the kids, why aren't we doing that with the kids, why aren't we doing more of this in the curriculum? And I'm saying well, I would love to develop it, but at the moment, we're prioritizing X, y and Z and I think there is a real you know, there's an opportunity cost here, but it's about being brave, isn't it? And I think it certainly sounds like you are starting to pull on all of the right threads before we, before we finish, could you give us a sense for people? I would imagine and I don't often do this I would imagine a lot of people will be listening to you and thinking I'd like to read more of Sarah's book. I'd like to read more of what she's written. Give us a sense of what's in the book in terms of how you've structured that, how you set about doing that.
Speaker 2:So for me, it was all about getting to the heart of understanding what oracy is, and you know this is very much. I've talked a lot today about. You know the entire concept of fluency, um, but for me, this book is very much about what oracy actually is. You know where it comes from. What does it actually mean? We've talked a lot about, um. You know the, the success criteria of effective communication, but what does that look like in the classroom? And one of the biggest things that I was an advocate for. I'm very much that type of person that recognizes that in order to understand something, I need to literally ask absolutely everyone, and it was fantastic to be able to speak to so many different people from so many different backgrounds about what strategies they use, how they use them and little things like what are the mutations and what are the misconceptions as well.
Speaker 2:And how can we avoid those and how can we make sure that, when we're doing it, we're doing it properly? And do you know what? It's one of those where the 2021 YouGov poll basically said that 8 out of ten 16 to 25 year olds wish that they'd learned more oracy. And you know over a third we talked then only a third of schools actually prioritize oracy in any way, shape or form. And you know, when we talk about that 16 to 25 year olds well, it looks at exactly what I wanted it to look at and it looks at why it's so important outside of the classroom, because what I think we don't do and it goes back to what you just said there is look at the bigger picture. I, as a teacher, you know, first and foremost, I'm a teacher and I want my student yes, I want my student to get the best possible gcse grade or keystone, you know, sats grade or a level grade. I want them to get the best grade that they can. But this is about effective communication strategies beyond the classroom. So why are we doing this? Because, actually, I want that student to be able to go to a job interview. I want that student to be able to have a relationship. You know, really it gets.
Speaker 2:It was a big thing for me to. It all started with that bugbear of. It started with two bugbears the speaking and listening being just an add-on. And why is an add-on when it's such an important skill? And then, you know, there was a conversation with um robert murray, who is in the book as an A-level teacher and he teaches. He's absolutely phenomenal and he teaches science, um, and he's head of chemistry at a sixth form, and one of the things that he was saying is that, for the best will in the world, absolutely amazing students were then going to interviews and not getting, you know, not getting their places. And the reason that they weren't getting their places is because of the interview process. It was the basic oracy skills that they were lacking. And yet all of that intellect and all of that intelligence is there and we talk about breaking this demographic divide.
Speaker 2:You know, if I was to go to a, a grammar school perhaps, or if I was to go to a private school, they are going to be taught oracy. They're going to be taught latin. They're going to be taught it as an explicit part of the curriculum and actually, when we think about the principles of code switching. In my opinion and this is very much as it is just my opinion on it the ability to code switch is so important and actually what we'd be able to see is that if we really focused on, you know, supporting the code switching of those students that were in, you know, state schools and our and our academy trust, it would give us so much more to go off, because not only you know, we talk about politicians being trained in the rhetoric and the art of the rhetoric.
Speaker 2:Could you imagine how much more powerful a you know, a person who perhaps came from a low income, you know provision would be in the ability to code switch up? Because actually, we've got a lot more relatability and a lot more understanding of the idea of why it's so important. We're not saying that we're going to teach people code switching skills in order for them to completely change who they are. We're not saying that you know, teaching oracy skills and this is this is something that the book goes over as well. We're not saying that teaching oracy skills means that you're not going to be able to speak to your friends like you normally would. You're not going to be able to speak to your family, but you're going to have an acute awareness of why you're speaking in that way and how you're speaking in that way?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's about that repertoire, isn't it? And I think that's my little voice to me, dad, why do you always, you know correct me when I say whatever it is, you know, whatever you know slang term he uses? And so I'm not trying to tell you how you know the way to speak. I'm trying to make you aware of the different, the different ways in which you're required to speak in order to open the doors that you might want to have open for you one day. You know, it's not about making everyone the same. It's about giving everyone the opportunity to be whoever they want to be, and I think there's that's no better place to finish than that. I think we've gone over and um, but I could listen to you all day. It's been phenomenal, and I think you're off on holiday soon, are you? Yeah?
Speaker 2:I am, I am, so we're. We're currently in the packing stages and we're going to go away for enjoy it every second.
Speaker 1:That's uh I would. I know that's going to be a well-earned break and thank you so much for coming on. It's massively appreciated no, thank you.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me.
