Not many state schools have societies dedicated to rigorous discussion — instead Labour plans to bring it into ordinary lessons
Classroom debating will become commonplace in most subjects under the new national curriculum, rather than “the preserve” of private schools, the education secretary has said.
Private schools, which can deviate from the national curriculum, have often been viewed as better at developing oracy skills in pupils through group discussions, regular presentations and debates.
There are minimal spoken language requirements for children aged 11 to 14 in the key stage 3 curriculum and in some subjects, such as geography and history, they are non-existent.
In the revised curriculum, the Department for Education is expected to add more specific requirements to make sure children are developing oral skills in more subjects.
In history, for example, pupils might discuss the relative strength of different historical sources, while in geography, students may present a case study on a natural disaster.
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This is very misjudged. If by “oracy skills” we mean rich vocabulary, sophisticated sentence structures, deep background knowledge, then we have very good evidence on how to teach those.
Class debating and discussion are great for all kinds of reasons but they are often the end point of those processes not necessarily the means to get there. As we have seen so many times before, this kind of ‘skills first’ fallacy confuses the outcome with the mechanism.