Oracy, the ability to communicate effectively, is at the very heart of SASF. We are driven by the fact that oracy is a fundamental life skill, which will support our pupils to gain employment or access further education.  Therefore, we consider it vital that our children are discretely taught these skills and have planned opportunities to practice and refine them.  It is also mirrored in our Christian values and our vision for every pupil to leave us having been systematically taught how to articulately express themselves, co-operate with others and speak confidently in front of any audience. 

We follow The Oracy Framework, defined by Cambridge University, which recognise 4 distinct areas:

• Physical – voice and body language.
• Cognitive – content, structure, clarifying and summarising and reasoning.
• Linguistic – vocabulary, language, rhetorical techniques.
• Social & Emotional – working with others, listening and responding, confidence in speaking and audience awareness.

Optimum Oracy

To discretely teach oracy skills and allow children planned opportunities to demonstrate them, each half term we hold our Optimum Oracy Competition.  Every child’s holiday home learning project is to research and prepare a 3 minute presentation on their previous PBL topic (or related issue). It may include up to 5 PowerPoint slides, but this is optional, as the school is also striving to improve children’s working memory. During week 1’s PBL sessions, children take turns to present to their class. The class, in turn, marks the presentation using our oracy feedback sheet (either individually, in groups or in sections according to their age and ability).  Two children from each class will be awarded a distinction and the winning child will go onto represent their class in the grand finals.  These finals will be separated into KS1, Lower KS2 and Upper KS2 and conducted in front of the whole school and a judging panel in order to crown our Optimum Oracy Champions.