St. Chad’s C of E Primary within Abbey Multi Academy Trust is proud to be a ‘talk-rich school’, where every child’s voice is valued. We are committed to developing the vital communication skills of all of our young people, so that they are supported and empowered to become the confident, articulate and globally minded citizens of the future. We are proud to be developing a culture of fluent, proficient communication within our school, which has innovative teaching and learning at the heart of its philosophy: to work in partnership to educate, nurture and empower.
We are proud to be entering our second year as a Voice 21 school and are currently developing our whole-school Oracy curriculum. This curriculum will be underpinned by the Oracy Framework created by Voice 21, which identifies four vital stands that enable successful discussion, inspiring speech and effective communication. The use of carefully planned, modelled and scaffolded talk in the classroom heightens subject knowledge and understanding for our children.
Oracy gives every child the opportunity to find and use their voice; to articulate their ideas, thoughts and feelings clearly and develops understanding. Effective communication helps every child to fulfil their potential and flourish in their school life and beyond, regardless of their background. Therefore, we endeavour to educate, nurture and empower every child to learn TO talk and learn THROUGH talk in our talk-rich school.
We have developed a shared language for improving oracy across our talk-rich Trust. These are the overarching principles for quality talk in our school:
Underpinning our shared language are various classroom resources and strategies:
Talk Tactics are used to facilitate effective discussions within the classroom by helping children to think strategically about their contributions to group talk.
We use listening ladders within our classrooms to support with effective speaking and active listening, leading to high-quality talk.
Our learners are encouraged to speak in full, coherent sentences when sharing their ideas and using spoken language. We have created a bank of differentiated sentence stems which our learners have access to in their classrooms and are carefully used in teacher’s planning. Please feel free to use these with your children at home.
