Developing Oracy in Computing
- primarytechreview
- Nov 26
- 6 min read
The 2025 Curriculum Review
According to the November 2025 Curriculum Review, oracy is one of the five areas areas of applied knowledge identified as needing more attention within the curriculum. (The others were financial literacy, media literacy, digital literacy and education on climate change and sustainability. Political knowledge was also an area raised frequently by young people.)
The curriculum review considers oracy to incorporate,
'Speaking, listening and communication, including verbal as well as other forms of non-written communication, such as sign language, non-verbal and Alternative and Augmentative Communication.'
The curriculum review outlines a vision of oracy being part of 'horizontal coherence in the curriculum', proving children with 'a coordinated and logical arrangement of topics across subjects, as well as within them.'
The curriculum review recommended that the government,
'Introduce an oracy framework to support practise and compliment the existing frameworks for reading and writing.'
The 2025 curriculum review makes a strong case for oracy being a part of subjects across the curriculum and a framework being developed to ensure this. It highlights oracy as being an area of children's education that needs to be developed and formalised, alongside developing fields like media literacy and digital literacy. Importantly, the curriculum review recommends that oracy be part of all subjects across the curriculum and not left to the speaking and listening requirements of English.
What is oracy?
The National Centre for Excellence in Teaching of Mathematics (NCETM) defines oracy as,
'The ability to express your thoughts and ideas fluently through speech.'
According to the Chartered College of Teaching,
'The term, 'oracy', can refer to the ability to communicate effectively, articulate thoughts and engage in meaningful discussions.'
'Talk for writing' has for a long time, been recognised as an important aspect of children producing written work fluently and effectively. Under talk for writing, children are given the opportunity to verbalise their ideas and explore expressions and vocabulary through talking, before committing these to paper or indeed, to coding.
Oracy takes this idea further, recognising that speaking is not just a means to an end, but an end in itself. Oracy recognises that effective spoken communication is vital for children's social development, self-confidence and ability to participate in work and social environments. It is difficult to think of a career where string oracy skills are not an advantage and for this reason alone, the development of oracy should be organised and begin early, as the curriculum review recommends.
Opportunities to develop oracy in primary computing
Scaffolding oracy
In computing, as within other subjects, teachers can provide children with scaffolds for expressing their spoken opinions, views and experience about a topic. Scaffolding helps children to structure their answers. Scaffolds can gradually be removed or adjusted as children grown in confidence. Scaffolding can include providing children with useful expressions, key vocabulary, prompts or useful sentence structures.
There are plenty of opportunities for debate and discussion in computing. These can include debate and discussions about how code might work, or debate about the implications of technology in the world. Debate in computing can be a good way to develops children's critical thinking, digital literacy and AI literacy. Providing hypothetical scenarios for children to debate is a good way to develop both children's digital literacy and oracy skills. In all debate activities, teachers can provide children with expressions and vocabulary to use that challenges them to improve the quality of their spoken responses.
Reading and predicting code
In this blog post, I wrote about the importance of reading code and how this should be at least as commonplace as children writing their own code.
As well as reading code, children should be given the opportunity to talk about it, make predictions and suggest ways that it could be improved, or ways that it might mot work. They can do this in pair, small groups or in presentations to the class.
As stated above, children will benefit from examples of good-quality spoken responses to code and scaffolding to help them structure their own good quality, spoken responses.
Unplugged activities
Unplugged activities are an established aspect of primary computing lessons. In unplugged activities, children explore concepts relating to computing away from screens, often using physical props or role play.
Goof examples of unplugged activities include children acting out the behaviour of characters in a computer game, robots in a task or the behaviour of packets of information across a network.
In these situations, children can sue and develop their oracy skills by explaining the behaviour of technology, developing their spoken communicative skills and strengthening their understanding of concepts in computing.
Digital literacy
Digital literacy is one of the three strands of computing. It is concerned with teaching children to use technology safely, responsibly, effectively and in a discerning way.
Children can use and develop their oracy skills and digital literacy skills by engaging in discussions, debates and presentations about safe and effective use of technology. A simple way to facilitate this is to provide children with scenarios for discussion at the start of a lesson. These scenarios can be as simple as a picture on the screen. By talking about what might have happened and shat should happen in different scenarios, children learn about digital literacy and have the opportunity to develop their spoken communicative skills.
For digital literacy lessons to be truly effective, children need to gain knowledge and understanding about issues relating to safe and effective use of technology. Teachers should provide children with age-appropriate facts, statistics and information that they can draw upon, strengthening both their understanding and spoken opinions and arguments. Teachers could take this further and use digital literacy topics as the basis for formal debates.
Computational thinking tasks
The national curriculum for computing mentions computational thinking as something that children should develop in computing lessons.
Computational thinking is usually defined as decomposing a problem, spotting patterns, abstraction and algorithm design.
Computational thinking can, and should be, part of computer tasks, including programming and media tasks. Children should learn to break these tasks down and approach them systematically, filtering out unneeded parts of the task and spotting patterns.
Teachers may also provide children with opportunities to develop this thinking through non-screen based activities. Children can be given classic, physical problems to solve (think building a marshmallow tower...). After several of these types of challenges, where the teacher point out good computational thinking, children will get better at approaching tasks systematically. The teacher can also work in opportunities foe oracy, as children suggest approaches, assign roles, negotiate and develop their ability to communicate effectively.
Discussing how games work
Most children will love the opportunity to talk about how their favourite games work. This can develop both children's oracy and computer science skills, particularly if the teacher prompts them to use language relating to computing, such as 'if', 'when', 'until' and 'change ... by'.
Game/project design, presentations
As part of their work in computing, children may be given the opportunity to work collaboratively on programming and design tasks. They may be given the task of designing a physical system, using equipment such as Crumble. They may be asked to design a game, or an animation using Scratch. They may even be asked to work on a project like Apps for Good, which I consider to be one of the most meaningful experiences children at key stage 2 or 3 can have. I wrote about Apps for Good in a blog post here.
As part of projects like these, children can be expected to present their ideas and their project. In this way, work done in computing can have crossover links with work done in written subjects like English. Presentations are also another way in which children can develop their oracy skills.
iMovie, podcasts, Book Creator
Filmmaking and podcasts are an enjoyable and important way for children to express their ideas and create digital content. By making films, children learn to convey an idea or a story they have in an engaging and powerful way, making use of camera angles, props and dialogue.
Children who make films will develop their oracy skills as they write and perform their speech, and also as they work within a team and decide the best way in which to tell their story. The Across Asia Film Festival (AAYFF) has some good examples of short films created by primary-age children.
Conclusions
Oracy has been rightly recognised as a crucial skill for children to develop. Oracy is a life skill and children who develop good spoken skills will be more successful in almost every career and aspect of adult life.
Development of oracy also benefits outcomes in subjects, including computing. Children who are able to verbalise their ideas coherently and confidently using high-quality language and phrases will be far more successful when they are writing, or coding independently. They will hear the 'inner voice' they have developed through practising oracy as they write scripts, programs or think tasks through.
Finally and perhaps most importantly, oracy gives children self confidence and self esteem in social situations by enabling them to communicate effectively with their peers. For these reasons, oracy should be a part of computing and subjects across the curriculum, as recommended by the 2025 curriculum review.
