21st Century Learners

The age of oracy is beginning! The great levers of state are at last being used to incentivise learning to, through and about talk.

The final report of England’s Curriculum and Assessment Review recommends that the government, ‘Introduces an oracy framework to support practice and to complement the existing frameworks for Reading and Writing.’[1] The government has accepted this recommendation.

Ofsted’s 2025 guidance for school inspectors places oracy alongside reading, writing and mathematics as essential for accessing the wider curriculum. Inspectors are directed to consider whether: ‘All pupils are explicitly taught how to communicate effectively through spoken language (oracy)…’.

It seems inevitable, then, that more and more schools will be looking to include oracy in their curricula, and this is something to be celebrated.  There is a wealth of evidence to suggest that it could and should enhance young people’s cognitive, personal and social development.[2]

Now the focus shifts to doing oracy well, and with this in mind I want to share my passionate conviction that teaching young people to engage in dialogue should be seen as central to a meaningful oracy education.

The games we play with language

Oracy covers a variety of different uses of language for different purposes. It’s important to remember this so that we don’t reduce it to the ability to speak clearly, articulately and confidently. These things are important, but oracy is about so much more.

This is acknowledged in recent accounts of the term. The Oracy Education Commission offers this definition, reflected in the Ofsted guidance quoted above:

‘Articulating ideas, developing understanding and engaging with others through speaking, listening and communication’.[3]

This suggests three overlapping fields of communicative purpose. Oracy Cambridge offers an alternative account:

‘The ability to use the skills of speaking, listening and non-verbal communication for a wide range of purposes.’[4]

This acknowledges that the range of purposes is too wide to capture in a concise definition.

I don’t believe there’s an authoritative list of these purposes, but I do think it’s important to recognise that they give rise to different modes of communication. I often refer to these different modes as different ‘talk games’,[5] and I don’t think they can be treated as if they are fundamentally the same.

Each of these games has its own aim, its own rules and its own set of skills or moves and each needs to be taught in distinctive ways. Let’s take two games commonly taught in schools: presentation and debate.

In presentation, the aim of the game is to transmit information to an audience, and the skills involved include voice projection, pace of speaking and choice of register.[6] It’s clearly a game we would like young people to able to play well in a range of different contexts.

Debate has its roots in the Old French debatre, which literally meant “to beat down” or “to fight”. It’s an adversarial game: the aim is to win. As we see all too often, winning can come at the expense of values such as veracity and an openness to learning, but debate can be useful in helping us to test the strength of competing arguments – in courtrooms or political forums, for example. The skills involved include rhetorical techniques and the strategic use of gesture and posture.

When I’m talking to people about oracy, I find that these are the first ‘games’ that come to mind: they’re valued highly. Just a few days ago, a colleague told me that she wanted all children – not just those with a public-school education – to be able to present themselves well, speak up for themselves and debate with confidence. This is why she was motivated to invest heavily in an oracy programme, and I think most people would agree that these are laudable aims.

Why teach for dialogue?

But I worry that a third game, dialogue, is often overlooked. Dialogue is one of those words that carries different meanings. In an everyday sense, it’s often taken to mean any kind of spoken interaction between two or more people. But it can also mean something more specific – something quite special.

The Greek roots of the term are dia, which can be translated as ‘through’ or ‘across’, and logos, often translated as ‘the word’, ‘speech’ or ‘reason’. This derivation conjures up a number of images or accounts of dialogue. Here are three accounts that I use regularly:

• Reason across difference
• Developing a shared story or understanding
• Talking together for better understanding

These seem important uses of language: a glance at UK and world events is surely enough for us to see that we need more of them.

Being able to match those who seek to bully and bluster their way to victory in debate without due regard for any form of objective truth is surely important. But all too often, debates perpetuate and exacerbate the divisions in our communities.

Dialogue is a different kind of game. The aim is not to win, but to achieve a shared understanding of each other and a better understanding of ourselves. It involves an attitude of openness to other perspectives – a willingness to hold them in tension with our own so that they interanimate and perhaps give rise to new ways of seeing. Ultimately, we may not come to agree with others – critical thinking remains important – but at least we come to understand them as fellow humans and not as ‘other’.

Listening is a principal skill in the dialogue game. Not listening for weaknesses in our opponents’ arguments so that we can attack them, but listening to understand the meaning behind others’ words, the experiences that led them to those meanings, and to the unfolding shared meaning in our dialogue.

Listening is one of four ‘dialogic practices’ promoted by The Academy of Professional Dialogue.[7] The others are:

• voice: sharing one’s authentic views with sensitivity to the context of the dialogue (not necessarily in full sentences!)
• respect: receiving another’s voice without judgement and allowing oneself to stand in the other’s shoes.
• suspension: hanging one’s views and feelings out there for all to look at, and holding them lightly – the opposite of suspension is being certain that you’re right!

These practices enable us to reason across our differences, to understand that it takes many perspectives to enable us to see the big picture of which we’re all a part, and to heal our fractured communities.

They are also humanising practices. All of us – children included – have the right to share our authentic voices, to be heard with respect and to learn from each other. For these reasons alone, teaching for dialogue as an outcome with its own value is imperative.

Why teach through dialogue?

It’s precisely the ability to reason together across differences in our understandings that makes dialogue such an important medium for learning in school.[8]

Take a look at this quote from the American physicist and dialogue expert David Bohm:

‘When one person says something, the other person does not in general respond with exactly the same meaning… the first person sees a difference between what he meant to say and what has been understood.… He may then be able to see something new which is relevant both to his own views and to those of the other person.’[9]

What if the first speaker were a teacher (or a peer) and the second a pupil? When the pupil responds, the teacher – if she is disposed to truly listen – may hear a difference between what she meant to say and what has been understood, and this becomes an opportunity.

If the teacher – and, perhaps, the pupil – can inhabit both perspectives for a while, they may be able to see something new. This may be something that illuminates their subject further, or it may be a greater awareness of their different ways of seeing. The crucial thing is that more than one perspective is valued and each person’s horizon is expanded. This is what it means to teach – and learn – through dialogue.[10]

But dialogue isn’t an easy game to play. The skills and attitudes that enable the genuine inter-animation of perspectives need to be learned and practised by both teachers and pupils.

Conclusion

It’s crucial, then, that any framework for oracy includes dialogue as a specific mode of communication and is informed by successful models for the development of dialogic teaching and learning – approaches such as Philosophy for Children,[11] the Thinking Together programme developed by Oracy Cambridge members Neil Mercer, Lyn Dawes and Rupert Wegerif[12] or Robin Alexander’s Dialogic Teaching.[13]

Games like presentation, debate and dialogue (and others not listed here) are all important components of oracy. Young people need to be taught to play them and to be taught how to match their mode of communication to their purpose. In many extended episodes of communication we switch from one game to another: a dialogue may lead to a debate as arguments are tested. The debate may return to the dialogue as we reflect on what we have learned. We might then present our new understanding to an audience.

For me, though, the ability to engage in dialogue – to reason across difference – is the most important game of all because it gives us hope for a future in which all our voices are heard with respect and contribute to a shared understanding of our human experience. In the age of oracy, we neglect dialogue at our peril.

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[1] Francis, Becky, ed. Curriculum and Assessment Review Final Report: Building a World-Class Curriculum for All. Department for Education, 2025, 115. Accessed November 2025.

[2] Useful sources of evidence include: All-Party Parliamentary Group on Oracy. Speak for Change: Final Report and Recommendations from the Oracy All-Party Parliamentary Group Inquiry. April 2021. Oracy APPG; Oracy Education Commission, We Need to Talk: The Report of the Commission on the Future of Oracy Education in England (London: Voice 21 and Impetus, 2024), , https://oracyeducationcommission.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/We-need-to-talk-2024.pdf (accessed November 2025).

[3] Oracy Education Commission, We Need to Talk: The Report of the Commission on the Future of Oracy Education in England (London: Voice 21 and Impetus, 2024), 14, https://oracyeducationcommission.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/We-need-to-talk-2024.pdf (accessed November 2025).

[4] Oracy Cambridge Team. “The Oracy Cambridge Response to the Oracy Education Commission Report.” Oracy Cambridge, October 30, 2024. Accessed November, 2025. https://oracycambridge.org/we-need-to-talk/

[5] Ludwig Wittgenstein famously used a similar analogy when he suggested that language has a variety of overlapping uses like a family of related games: Wittgenstein, L.udwig. Philosophical Investigations. 4th ed. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte. Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

[6] The Oracy Skills Framework and Glossary provides a useful starting point for the identification and teaching of skills associated with different modes of communication: Oracy Cambridge and Voice 21. The Oracy Skills Framework and Glossary. Cambridge: Oracy Cambridge, June 2020. https://oracycambridge.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/The-Oracy-Skills-Framework-and-Glossary.pdf

[7] The Academy of Professional Dialogue website is at https://www.aofpd.org/. You can read about the dialogic practices in this book: Isaacs, William. Dialogue: The Art of Thinking Together. Crown Business, 1999.

[8] I’ve written more extensively about the role of dialogue in teaching and learning elsewhere. See, for example, Phillipson, Neil. “Teaching and Learning on Buber’s Narrow Ridge.” Oracy Cambridge (blog), September 7, 2023. Accessed November, 2025. https://oracycambridge.org/bubers-narrow-ridge/; Phillipson, Neil. “A Teacher’s Guide to Dialogic Pedagogy Part 1: The What and the Why.” 21st Century Learners (blog), April 2020. Accessed November 24, 2025. http://21stcenturylearners.org.uk/?p=1337; Phillipson, Neil, and Rupert Wegerif. Dialogic Education: Mastering Core Concepts through Thinking Together. Routledge, 2017.

[9] Bohm, David, and Lee Nichol, ed. On Dialogue. Routledge, 1996. (p. 3)

[10] There are different views on what counts as ‘true dialogue’ in the classroom. Ultimately, though, any interaction in which two or more perspectives are heard, valued and used to create better understanding can be described as ‘dialogic’. On this basis, groups of pupils engaged in Exploratory Talk or Thinking Together are being dialogic even though some would not call this true dialogue.

[11] A good starting point for finding out about Philosophy for Children is the SAPERE (soon to be Thoughtful) website available at https://www.sapere.org.uk/

[12] See https://thinkingtogether.educ.cam.ac.uk/

[13] Alexander, Robin. A Dialogic Teaching Companion. Routledge, 2020.