Challenging Oracy and Citizenship Myths

Speaking skills in Britain are under sustained threat. Oral skills have been side-lined in the state curriculum since 2013, whilst social media and digital technologies have contributed to a decline in the ability to communicate face-to-face. In the words of a Times Education Supplement editorial, we risk producing "a generation unable to speak in public." (2018). As research from the Sutton Trust (2017) and British Academy (2022) has shown, this poses a threat to workers in an age of automation in which 'soft skills' are increasingly valued by employers. It also poses a crisis of citizenship. The loss of encouragement of, and space for, spoken interaction and deliberation threatens social cohesion at a moment in which ordinary people's voices need to be heard more than ever before.

To confront these crises, it is vital that speaking and listening skills are placed back at the heart of British state education and championed as a fundamental element of confident democracies. A chief obstacle to this is the prevalence of harmful myths about communication education and citizenship on the part of policymakers, parents, and society at large.

One myth is that a focus on speaking in schools (known by the term 'oracy') is not "traditional." Successive education ministers have made 'oracy' part of a culture war. In 2013 Michael Gove dismissed such "new-fangled" ideas, arguing that that "the left is betraying the working class by not giving them access to 'traditional education.'" In 2017 Nick Gibb reiterated this distinction between "traditional methods" and "seductive-sounding ... child-centred theories."

A second myth is that certain languages or speaking styles only belong to those from certain backgrounds. This is a problem of class: as Iranga Tcheko, a public speaking mentor from East London put it in the recent BBC documentary The Power of Debating (2018), "most people think debating is just for posh people." It is also a matter of ethnicity: as one mixed race Scottish student recently wrote (Gal-Dem, 2019) "I don't think many Gaelic teachers are prepared to have pupils of colour in their classroom, let alone understand what that means for the students themselves"

Finally, there is the myth that citizenship is just about elections. Research from the UCL Constitution Unit (2022) found widespread frustration and misunderstandings among young people about how they could use their 'voice' in democracy.

Since 2020, our AHRC-funded project Speaking Citizens (AH/T004290/1) has been assembling new bodies of knowledge to challenge these negative assumptions, using humanities and social science methods. Our proposed activities will expand the reach and impact of these findings through the following two forms:

i) A teaching unit on 'Oracy and Rhetoric across the Curriculum' for use in Scottish state secondary schools.
This unit will provide the first dedicated scheme of oracy for Scotland aimed at pupils aged 13-14, challenging the dominant narrative that rhetoric is the preserve of the elite, by working with teachers in local authority schools across Scotland to present persuasive speaking and listening skills as an egalitarian resource.

ii) Animated videos presenting core messages.
We will produce and disseminate a series of three animations condensing our core research messages:

a) The Radical History of Oracy: showing how Victorian political activists such as the Chartists and Suffragettes used mutual training in speaking skills as part of grassroots efforts to create change for marginalised people.

b) '"Doing" Citizenship Now': a TikTok video narrating the experience of two Leeds teenagers learning how to express their perspectives on social issues through graffiti art and drill music.

c) Speak Gaelic? You're a Gael: a video narrates the experience of a new ethnic minority learner encountering the world of Gaelic language education for the first time and experiencing its transformative benefi