LAURA KERSLAKE, TEACHING AND ASSESSMENT RESEARCH SPECIALIST, CHARTERED COLLEGE OF TEACHING, UK
Introduction
Transitions between primary and secondary school are challenging for many students, which can lead to a lack of engagement or a dip in attainment in Key Stage 3. The Curriculum and Assessment Review (DfE, 2025) highlighted these difficulties and the need to ensure smooth transitions between primary and secondary school. The Department for Education (DfE, 2024, 2026) also emphasises the extra support that certain groups of students need as they transition between schools, such as those with SEND (special educational needs and disabilities), students from different cultures and races, and those from low socio-economic groups. Students may encounter difficulties not only academically but also socially and emotionally, leading to disruptive behaviours (Harris and Nowland, 2021; Bagnall et al., 2020).
Oracy education is the development of a range of different speaking and listening skills in a range of contexts. The Curriculum and Assessment Review (DfE, 2025) has recommended that oracy become a component of the national curriculum in England as part of curriculum revisions over the next two years. This piece considers the role that oracy can play in supporting students as they enter secondary school, by developing social and emotional skills.
Challenges for students at transition into secondary school
Well, in history, I don’t like reading because it’s like different words for everything. I say, “What does that mean, Sir?”
Year 7 student
A student said these words to me during a school visit. It exemplifies one of the key issues that students have with the demands of secondary school learning: they encounter a large amount of new vocabulary across curriculum subjects – three or four times more per day than they encountered in primary school (Menzies et al., 2020). This greatly increases the demands on students, and vocabulary has been highlighted as a particular area of difficulty (McBride, 2023) – although not the only one.
The important point is not the student’s difficulty with new words; it is his response to this difficulty: he asks the teacher for help when he doesn’t know the meaning of a word. Think of all the other things that the student could do in that situation: feel anxious but keep quiet, display disruptive behaviour or disengage from learning. These behaviours are some of those highlighted in transition literature as barriers to effective transitions and students’ success in secondary school.
Obviously, the goal of primary school cannot be to teach every piece of knowledge or vocabulary that students might need to know in secondary school; all students will encounter new information as part of their secondary education. Instead, the question is: what can primary and secondary schools do to ensure that students know what to do when they encounter something new or don’t understand something? Oracy education may offer an answer to this question by developing social and emotional skills that lead to positive learning behaviours.
Oracy and social and emotional skills
Social and emotional skills, such as resilience and building and maintaining relationships with others, have a positive association with greater wellbeing in schools and academic attainment (DfE, 2024). The student quoted here displayed a number of social and emotional skills when he asked for help: the confidence to speak to the teacher, the resilience to admit that he didn’t know something and the engagement to know that he needed help. When students can articulate a need for help, it enables teachers to provide additional support.
Social and emotional development is part of commonly used oracy frameworks (Oracy Cambridge and Voice 21, 2020), and the positive relationship between language and social and emotional development has been identified (Pasquier et al., 2022). An oracy education aims to develop students’ listening skills, ability to disagree respectfully, confidence to express their own voice and turn-taking skills (Kerslake, 2019). This in turn supports the development of social and emotional skills, building relationships with peers and teachers to increase engagement and reduce disruptive behaviours.
However, students need to know how to communicate effectively. Therefore, developing students’ oracy skills in primary schools, particularly with regard to social and emotional skills, could have a positive impact on their transition to secondary school, helping them to navigate unfamiliar contexts and content.
Removing barriers to effective oracy practice
School leaders need to carefully consider how to implement an inclusive oracy education that positively contributes to school culture. There are some concerns that oracy is not always inclusive. For example, researchers working with teachers in Liverpool explored difficulties in including Liverpool English in their oracy teaching. The authors called for policies to validate regional variations of English in oracy education (Lampropoulou et al., 2025). Cushing (2024) has similarly expressed concerns that oracy is regarded from a deficit perspective – what children cannot do and ways in which they should speak. Children from different socio-economic or cultural backgrounds may communicate in ways that might be different from school norms.
One student might put their hand up and say, ‘I dunno what that means,’ while another might say, ‘Please sir, could you tell me what that word means?’ The latter example is what we might think of as polite, formal English, which can have a higher ‘currency’ in schools. Yet both students are asking for help, and in this case, it is the function of the words (their purpose) and not their form (how they’re said) that matters.
Students with SEND may also communicate in ways that are different from social or cultural norms. Making eye contact might be challenging for some students on the autism spectrum, and yet some schools are using eye contact as an example of good oracy practice. As oracy becomes part of the national curriculum, it is important that schools take a thoughtful approach to oracy education for different groups of students. Otherwise, there is a risk that oracy education could actually decrease feelings of belonging and engagement, which could be detrimental to positive behaviour and school culture.
Recommendations for practice
- Primary schools should focus on social and emotional aspects of oracy as well as academic. These should centre on the skills that students will need as they transition to secondary school, particularly in upper Key Stage 2.
- Primary and secondary schools should liaise with each other to ensure a joined-up approach to an oracy curriculum and to share information about which students may need more support.
- Teachers should utilise oracy-based approaches in Year 7 to find out what students already know and where they are struggling.
- Teachers should not impose a one-size-fits-all approach to oracy, but instead consider what is the purpose of the talk and take a broad approach to how it is communicated.
- Primary and secondary schools should consider how to support the oracy education of students with SEND , including additional scaffolding or small-group sessions.
