Is Labour right about the power of oracy?

It is no surprise that a speechwriter and a barrister-turned-politician would think the art of speech-making should be taught in schools. It’s like pig farmers at a barbecue eulogising the nutritional value and superior flavour of pork. 

The speechwriter in question is Peter Hyman and the former barrister is Sir Keir Starmer, Britain’s presumptive next PM.

In serious fields of scholarly inquiry, the goal is to make the complex appear simple. Unfortunately, the field of education sits under the social sciences, which try to make the commonplace sound complicated. This is why making speeches and discussing ideas are dubbed ‘oracy’ and are the Labour party’s new big education idea. 

Is this what the good people of Worthington and Dudley North demand from their education policy? If so, I’ve missed it. Will oracy’s purported links to social mobility allow working-class children to enter unpaid media internships or jobbing-actor-with-a-trust-fund like their privileged peers? Is that why Labour is pursuing it? A more likely origin for this initiative lies with Peter Hyman.

Once Tony Blair’s speechwriter, Hyman left the political world for education and founded a free school – School 21 in Stratford, east London. He is now back in the Labour fold, advising Starmer on education. 

The purpose of the free school movement was to establish innovative schools that could experiment with different methods of education. Other schools could then copy what worked and jettison the rest. Perhaps the two most notable to emerge over the past decade were Michaela Community School in Wembley and Hyman’s School 21.

What can be learned about Hyman’s ideas from his school? School 21 and Voice 21, the organisation founded to evangelise his model, are educationally progressive. This is a distinct philosophy with a history that can be traced to Locke and Rousseau, although it was the American reformer John Dewey who defined its four tenets: learning by doing, discussion, interactivity and interdisciplinary learning. 

While traditionalists want orderly classrooms, the progressivist classroom is a loud mental assault course that provides the experiences needed for honing the mental muscle so it performs better in abstract skills. The classroom is necessarily a place where students have a say in what and how they learn.

In 2016, Hyman debated project-based learning with Daisy Christodoulou, a former teacher who wrote an influential book, Seven Myths About Education. At the start of his speech, Hyman produced busts of Karl Marx and Margaret Thatcher sculpted in a history class by 14-year-olds learning about the Cold War. He went on to tell a heartwarming tale of history teachers and art teachers working together in harmony.

Hyman is sincere. Like all good speechwriters, he is aware of counter-arguments to his views. He goes out of his way to insist he is not opposed to the acquisition of knowledge, it is just other aims are important. 

At one point in the debate, Hyman talked about teachers applying for jobs at his school who had excellent academic qualifications but lacked empathy and social skills to such a degree that they were ‘unappointable’. Teaching these skills is therefore vital.

We can imagine the kind of candidate he means, but do we stop to question whether qualities such as empathy can be taught? If so, how? What does an empathy lesson look like? Such questions are unanswerable and so efforts to teach these qualities involve throwing children into project work and waiting for a miracle. Time spent on this is time not spent teaching knowledge and skills.

It is precisely such a diversion of resources that Starmer is calling for. To him, oracy is a ‘skill’ distinct from knowledge and children need a ‘grounding’ in both ‘skills and knowledge, practical problem-solving and academic rigour’. Is a mere grounding in academic knowledge sufficient, or can we hope for something more profound? 

Add the context of a moral panic about artificial intelligence taking away jobs and Starmer makes a case for pushing the supposed human skills that computers cannot replicate. However, this doesn’t even work on its own terms. The ability to spout forth at great length about subjects they don’t understand is the unique selling point of AI systems like ChatGPT. On the other hand, their weakness is they tend to get their facts wrong and ‘hallucinate’ things that are not true. 

So, where does Hyman’s educational model work? School 21 is not an outlier in terms of academic results. Despite a promising start, it is now middle of the pack and has drawn a negative assessment by Ofsted. So, there is no clear proof-of-principle available. 

It is therefore hard to explain why oracy and the School 21 model is Labour’s next big educational idea. The worry would be that Labour has gone along with all this without doing their homework. Yes, it is a clear point of difference with the Tory agenda, but one where no point of difference is warranted. 

Perhaps, when all is said and done, oracy is just a new talking point.