The Madani Girls’ School

Equipping governors to drive oracy forward

At the beginning of our oracy journey, we realised that we needed school governors as allies for our implementation journey, so made it a priority to secure their buy-in. In order to do this, we established a working party of teachers to identify where improvements to the school’s oracy provision could be made. Whilst, the working party found that there was good oracy practice happening in classrooms, they concluded that the school lacked a shared language for oracy. These findings were presented to school governors, ensuring that they understood the school’s starting point in oracy and enabling them to drive forward our vision for oracy.

Ensuring parents understand the importance of oracy

Parents were initially unconvinced about the school’s vision to provide every child with a high-quality oracy education, questioning the need when students typically performed above average in national examinations. One particular event- a student-led parent’s evening during which teacher-student roles were flipped and students presented a piece of work they were proud of to their parents and teacher- was crucial to changing this perception.

During thise event, parents could clearly see that their children’s presentational oracy skills could be further developed. skills were lacking. Seeing the reality of the gap in their children’s oracy skills helped the parents of our students understand the need to develop our school’s oracy provision for better oracy practice throughout the school. Parents are now more involved in and supportive of our focus on oracy.

Transforming the lives of students and communities

As we serve a school community where a wide-range of language are spoken at home, we were also keen to emphasise that oracy skills can be developed in all languages. We have translated a number of our school’s oracy resources into the languages students speak at home so that parents can support their children to develop their oracy skills.