14/06/2026
The Six Tests of a Serious Oracy Curriculum
The phrase 'a culture of oracy' has become increasingly popular.
The problem is that a culture is not a curriculum.
A culture tells us that something is valued. It tells us nothing about what is taught.
A curriculum answers a different question:
What are students expected to learn?
Until that question is answered, oracy remains an aspiration rather than a curriculum.
Any serious approach to oracy should satisfy six tests.
1. Does it specify a body of knowledge?
Every curriculum begins with knowledge. If oracy is to be taught, schools must identify the knowledge and practices that constitute effective communication.
Oracy is often promoted as a way of closing educational gaps. However, opportunities for talk do not guarantee learning. A more equitable approach is to make the knowledge and practices of effective communication explicit and teach them to all students. The purpose of an oracy curriculum is to democratise access to communication.
2. Does it give students something worth talking about?
Students do not communicate in the abstract. They communicate about ideas, concepts and problems. Standalone oracy lessons, debates and podcasts have little educational value unless they deepen subject knowledge, develop disciplinary thinking or strengthen communication itself.
3. Does it teach communication knowledge?
Students need to learn how communication works: how vocabulary creates precision, how structure supports clarity, how reasoning strengthens arguments and how audience and purpose influence language choices.
4. Does it develop metacognition?
The best communicators do more than speak. They plan, monitor, adapt and reflect. Communication is a metacognitive act as much as a linguistic one.
5. Does it specify progression?
If communication can be taught, it should be possible to describe how it develops. A curriculum requires a sequence, not merely a list of desirable outcomes.
6. Does it make assessment possible?
Assessment cannot come first. The knowledge must be specified, progression described and development exemplified before meaningful assessment can take place.
Tongue Fu Talking® was designed to meet these six tests
Test 1: The four disciplines, The Stance, The Flow, The Mind and The Bond, define the body of knowledge.
Test 2: Communication is taught through curriculum content rather than in isolation.
Test 3: Twenty-three teachable practices explicitly teach communication knowledge.
Test 4: The Mindwalkers framework develops metacognitive awareness through six strategies.
Test 5: White, Green, Brown and Black Belts provide progression from EYFS to KS3.
Test 6: Student expectations and assessment tools make development visible.
Conclusion
The question is not whether a school has a culture of talk. It is whether schools can explain what students are learning when they do.
That is the difference between a culture of oracy and a serious oracy curriculum.
