Oracy: Our Leadership Journey

This article has been published as part of the Rethinking Curriculum project, kindly funded by The Helen Hamlyn Trust.

Hilary MacMeekin, Headteacher at Noremarsh Junior School

Oracy has been creeping up our agenda in recent years. We are a school on a rapid journey of change. Understanding that journey is key to understanding why we are prioritising oracy at this moment. The school received a ‘requires improvement’ (RI) judgement in November 2017 before joining a trust in December 2018. I took over as headteacher in September 2021. I was really lucky to have had the time from being appointed in March 2021 to starting in September that allowed me to visit regularly and get to know the team and the community quite well. It meant that in September, although, alongside the central team, we agreed that the school would be in special measures if OfstedThe Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills – a non-ministerial department responsible for inspecting and regulating services that care for children and young people, and services providing education and skills visited, I already had a good understanding of what our priorities should be and who would be best placed to support me to bring about rapid improvement. When we were inspected in February 2022, we were given a second RI judgement. 

When I took up the post, we began by focussing on teaching and learning consistencies, behaviour, and teachers’ understanding and use of data, with curriculum development as a longer-term project. We are always really strategic in our communication with the team about why we are making changes. We want them to really understand so that they fully buy into changes we are making. We review regularly and only move on when we know we have absolutely nailed one thing, so that although change has been rapid, it has also been manageable. This has been a real challenge for us as a leadership team as, being a double RI school, there is a real urgency to change everything that needs addressing and to do it all straight away. As headteacher, it is my job to make sure that we stay focussed on what our priorities are for right now, in order to manage workload and support staff wellbeing, while at the same time ensuring that what we are doing, we are doing well, so that the changes we make are sustained. 

Understanding the capacity of our team at a given point has been crucial to our success, including within my leadership team. We timetable senior leadership team (SLT) days away from school once every short term to ensure we are looking at both the strategic priorities and the operational challenges coming up in advance of each new term starting. We are always considering who is best placed to lead on something and when it is best to share things with the rest of the team. We set aside time in professional development meetings for colleagues to action changes while being supported by the SLT. We also trial things within subject leaders’ classes before rolling them out more widely, so that we can unpick potential barriers and identify support that might be needed. We have also worked hard to create a culture where our team know it is okay to ask for help, whether that is additional release time, support with planning, team teaching with someone from SLT or seeing us teach their class. We try very hard to facilitate these things promptly, which has meant that we take our team with us. 

Last year, English was our main priority area within the curriculum. We started using the platform Literacy Tree, in line with other schools in our trust, and this has been empowering for our teachers in terms of confidence, subject knowledge and creativity. We rolled the approach out in a series of planned and deliberate acts. Starting with the teaching of writing, we had an INSET day led by a Literacy Tree consultant, which included supported planning time, with TAs on hand to help resource units and SLT and consultants available to support with planning. This all meant we could launch the writing element of the plan the following day, with the subject lead’s year group trialling reading at the same time. This was a hugely successful approach and rapidly led to a marked improvement in writing across the school. We launched the reading element of the plan in a similar fashion, through twilights the following term. The subject lead was, by then, confident in supporting key team members and specific needs across the school.

During this time, we had several visits from an Ofsted inspector who we work with. She is insightful and generous and I really value her input. There is a respectful and reciprocal curiosity to our dynamic. I want to fully understand her perspective and feedback, but she knows that I know my school best and what our current capacity is. She highlighted part way through the year that oracy needed to be developed further. However, I could see that we did not have the capacity – it would become just one more thing and would not be taken on as we needed it to be. I also wanted to give my subject leader time to unpick what our starting point was and plan effectively, rather than rushing into it because it had been identified as a need. So, we paused. We continued to support teaching teams with the roll out of changes to reading and writing through Literacy Tree and when Natasha (our English Lead and Assistant Headteacher) had capacity, we began working on how we would approach oracy at Noremarsh. 

Knowing our starting point was really important to us. Natasha carried out a learning walk with our trust’s Teaching and Learning Lead. This highlighted that all classes had established good routines and behaviours for partner talk, but that there appeared to be a disparity between different teachers’ understanding of oracy, which led to variation in quality of practice. Natasha then sent out an online form to all staff to assess their understanding of oracy and their continuing professional development (CPD) needs. This confirmed the variation in teachers’ understanding of oracy and gave us a clear idea of where to start. We then worked with PiXL, an education leadership network, and went on an excellence visit to a trust in Plymouth who had worked on oracy for several years. The journey and down time on this trip allowed for a real richness of conversation about our context and what we needed to do next. We began with professional development for teachers and teaching assistants, and built on the good practice already in place around teacher talk. We have introduced hand gestures for children to build/challenge/agree. We have established expectations for children to project and track, and rolled all of these out as a starting point. This will be the focus of our coaching this term. We have introduced sentence stem mats for discussions and dual-coded these with widgits, as we have a very high proportion of learners with special education needs and disabilities across the school. This builds on existing practice, particularly in maths and English. We decided to have one discussion sentence stems sheet for the whole school to start with and then build up to having more complex ones further up the school once these sentence starters are embedded. We have further CPD planned for each short term and the Teaching and Learning Lead will revisit this with Natasha this term. 

For us, the success of any change in practice comes from:

• knowing our team well, so that we understand the team’s current capacity
• making time to plan and be strategic with senior and middle leaders, including making time to trial and schedule planned and deliberate acts 
• breaking changes down into small and manageable steps and delivering CPD for all, so that everyone is on board and has a shared understanding of changes being made 
• asking for and taking on board feedback, so that we can continue to adapt and evaluate the practicality and impact of our approach.

We are just at the beginning of our oracy journey –an exciting time at Noremarsh.