Speaking Citizens: The Politics of Speech Education 1850-Present

Speaking skills in Britain are under sustained threat. Changes to the National Curriculum in 2014 and the removal of the speaking component from the GCSE in English in 2013 have side-lined oral skills in British state schools. Social media and digital technologies are contributing to a marked decline in the ability to communicate face-to-face. As a result, we risk producing what some fear will be "a generation unable to speak in public" (1). This poses a threat to tomorrow's workers in an age of automation in which 'soft skills' will become increasingly valued. It also poses a crisis of citizenship. The loss of encouragement of and space for individuals' spoken contributions 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 skills are placed back at the heart of British state education and championed as a fundamental element of confident democracies. Speaking Citizens brings together a team of researchers who aim to do this by working with educational partners and policymakers to provide the evidence needed to make the political case for speaking skills' role in strengthening citizenship.

Under the label 'oracy', speaking has become one of the most eagerly debated concepts in contemporary educational theory. Yet there is a pressing need for the humanities to provide critical perspective on and historical context for this pedagogy. Our team comprises of four specialists ideally placed to do this. Hester Barron (Co-I) is Senior Lecturer in History at Sussex and an expert in educational history. Stephen Coleman (Co-I) is Professor of Political Communication at Leeds and leading theorist of participatory democracy. Arlene Holmes-Henderson (PDRA) is an educational consultant and fellow on the AHRC's 'Advocating Classics Education' project at King's College London. Tom F. Wright (PI) is Senior Lecturer in English at Sussex and an expert in the cultural history of rhetoric. Our team will be completed by a PDRA specialising in late Twentieth Century migration, race and education.

Over three years, we will complete overlapping case studies that interrogate ideas about speech and citizenship from the advent of compulsory education (c.1850) to the present. Ranging from community groups in present-day Leeds, back through 1960s radical educational thinkers, 1920s London primary schools, to late-Victorian women's elocution, we will use diverse new archives to reconstruct the political history of speech education. By looking at contemporary real-life speech situations we will also explore how the dynamics of political talk in non-formal adult contexts might transform school-based approaches. The outputs from these investigations will consist of a collection of open access essays (Oracy Across The Disciplines), four peer-reviewed research articles, and a monograph (Speaking Citizens: The History and Future of An Idea).

Moreover, thanks to several years of network-building with partners including the English Speaking Union, Oracy Cambridge and Voice 21, we also have a clear impact and dissemination strategy. In the first two years, the team will work with partner teachers at dialogue events at Sussex and a conference hosted by the Faculty of Education at Cambridge bringing together educators with academics to discuss our findings. By the start of year three, we will have developed these into teaching resources to be rolled out over the final year as a series of pedagogy workshops in partner schools; and two policy presentations at the Department for Education and Home Office. The project will end with a session of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Oracy hosted at the House of Commons.

Through these outputs and pathways, we will make a major intervention into educationa debates, enabling a more evidence-based case for the integration of speaking skills with citizenship education

Our project aims to make speaking and listening training more widely available in the state education sector. We will do this by providing our partner organisations with a knowledge base that will allow them to make the political case for speaking skills' role in strengthening forms of citizenship. In the immediate term, we aim to help reform the way speaking is taught in state schools by encouraging the embedding of oracy across the curriculum. Longer term, we aim to reverse damaging changes to the UK curriculum, and to strengthen democracy by bolstering face-to-face communication skills.

The project responds to the need of partner organisations who have called for more research about speech education to correct misconceptions and to generate "rigorous, evidence-based practice" (ESU, Speaking Frankly, 2015). Our work will benefit two groups of civil society organisations. First, teachers invested in the promotion of talk-based skills (members of the Oracy Network, the Society of Teachers of Speech and Drama, and at Voice 21's School 21 in east London) and citizenship education (the Association for Citizenship Teaching). Currently teachers are ill-served by "the deficit of resources and guidance available" on oracy teaching (Voice 21, State of Speech, 2016). Moreover, there is currently an overemphasis on 'skills' at the expense of a broader case for talk-based pedagogy. Our project will provide a firm knowledge base to make a more powerful case for oracy based on the idea of citizenship, transcending the instrumental case in favour of a more engaging and ambitious vision of 'speaking citizens'.

In this way our research will enable practitioners to teach in different ways, and more confidently embed 'talk' across the curriculum, rather than just in set-piece exercises. By presenting the positive and negative lessons from historical approaches, and by providing a framework rooted in past and present cultural attitudes to citizenship, our work will allow teachers to transform and re-energise the way citizenship education is taught, and allow students to benefit from a holistic and innovative pedagogy.

Second, our research will also benefit civil society organisations such as the English Speaking Union and Voice 21, the British Council and Toastmasters International, who aim to promote spoken communication within schools and beyond. Equally our research will benefit the work of organisations such as the Young Citizens, and Citizens UK, who aim to promote greater understanding of citizenship, civic engagement and empowerment.

A major audience for our work is policymakers working on issues of speaking and listening education and citizenship. Professor Neil Mercer has said he has found it "hard to persuade" policymakers on the oracy agenda. By providing a new framework and richer knowledge base, our project will equip reformers with a new means to argue their case, and a wider range of allies and advocates across the humanities. The All Party Parliamentary Group on Oracy set up in spring 2018 by Labour MP Emma Hardy is our primary political external partner, in addition to the equivalent group for Skills and Employment chaired by Labour MP Nic Dakin, and the Lords' Committee on Citizenship and Civic Engagement. Our most immediate policy-making beneficiaries will be the Department for Education's research department and Expert Group on Citizenship, and the migration policy centre at the Home Office.

Moreover, by proving the importance of a talk-based model of citizenship, we will allow disparate groups of advocates for civic engagement to form a common alliance against damaging policy shifts. For example, our project will enable the APPG on oracy to work more closely with other parliamentary bodies focused on citizenship and skills. These interventions will ultimately benefit the broader public and society by helping address the looming skills crisis and promote social cohesion and confident democratic culture.