How Do You Assess Oracy? A Practical Approach for Schools Ahead of the New Oracy Framework

The UK’s First Oracy Age Assessment Tool: Why Measuring Spoken Communication Matters More Than Ever

By Amy Rose, Director of Learning Loft

We assess reading.

We assess writing.

We assess maths.

We assess knowledge, recall, spelling, comprehension, vocabulary and practically everything else pupils do in school.

But what about their ability to speak?

Not simply whether they are confident enough to put their hand up.

Can they explain an idea clearly? Structure an argument? Choose vocabulary precisely? Respond appropriately to another person? Adapt how they communicate for a different audience or purpose?

For something so fundamental to education — and to life beyond it — spoken communication has historically been remarkably difficult for schools to measure consistently.

That was one of the biggest reasons I wanted to create LoftTalk.

LoftTalk — our oracy assessment software for schools — was developed as the UK’s first Oracy Age assessment tool, giving schools a structured way to capture spoken responses, analyse oracy and track development over time.

And it goes further than English alone. LoftTalk was built with multilingual speaking and assessment in mind, with six-language capability — something that becomes particularly interesting when we think about EAL pupils, language learning and increasingly multilingual classrooms.

But the technology itself isn’t really the important story.

The question that matters is:

If we believe oracy is important, how do we actually know whether our pupils are getting better at it?

Oracy is moving up the national education agenda

This isn’t simply something Learning Loft has decided matters.

Oracy is becoming increasingly prominent in national education policy.

The government’s response to the Curriculum and Assessment Review has confirmed plans for a new primary oracy framework, alongside a combined secondary oracy, reading and writing framework.

Significantly, the government has said the primary framework will provide teachers with guidance on how to formatively assess and support pupils’ oracy.

That word — assess — matters.

Because schools have been creating opportunities for pupil talk for years.

Think-pair-share.

Presentations.

Class discussion.

Debate.

Questioning.

Collaborative learning.

But providing opportunities to talk and understanding how well pupils can communicate are two different things.

If oracy is going to sit more prominently alongside reading and writing, we need to become much better at understanding what progress in spoken communication actually looks like.

The problem with assessing oracy

I spent around a decade leading oracy, and one of the challenges has always been its subjectivity.

Ask a group of teachers to identify the strongest speakers in a class and certain pupils will immediately come to mind.

Usually, they’re confident.

They contribute frequently.

They’re comfortable speaking publicly.

But are they necessarily the strongest communicators?

Imagine two pupils.

One speaks constantly. They’re enthusiastic, loud and happy to present in front of the class.

The other rarely volunteers.

But when invited into a discussion, that pupil listens carefully, chooses vocabulary precisely, structures an intelligent response and builds directly on what somebody else has said.

Who has stronger oracy?

We don’t actually have enough information to decide.

And that’s important.

Confidence is not the same thing as competence.

Quietness isn’t evidence of poor oracy.

Accent isn’t evidence of poor oracy.

Extroversion isn’t evidence of excellent oracy.

And frequency of contribution isn’t the same thing as quality of communication.

If we’re serious about assessing oracy, we have to look beneath those surface impressions.

So what does good oracy actually look like?

This is where having a framework becomes useful.

Rather than asking:

“Is this child a good speaker?”

we can begin asking much more specific questions.

Can they communicate fluently?

Can they make themselves understood?

Is their vocabulary appropriate and precise?

Can they organise an explanation or argument?

Can they adapt and respond when communication becomes interactive?

Current Learning Loft materials organise LoftTalk’s assessment around recognised oracy domains and preserve the spoken evidence behind the judgement, so teachers can review rather than relying solely on memory. (see how LoftTalk works)

That distinction is incredibly important.

We move from:

“She’s quite confident.”

to:

“She communicates fluently, but needs to develop the structure of extended responses.”

Now I have something I can teach.

Why we created an Oracy Age

This was the thinking behind Oracy Age.

Schools have long been familiar with the idea of a reading age.

It gives us another lens through which to understand where a pupil is in their development.

I kept coming back to the same question:

Why don’t we have something similar for spoken communication?

LoftTalk’s Oracy Age gives schools an age-related indication of a pupil’s spoken communication development alongside the more detailed analysis underneath it.

And the second part of that sentence is crucial.

I don’t want an Oracy Age to become another number that gets entered into a spreadsheet and forgotten.

The number should start the conversation, not finish it.

If a pupil’s profile suggests a particular area is less developed, I want the next question to be:

Why?

And then:

What are we going to teach them next?

That’s when assessment becomes useful.

Why six languages matter

This is another aspect of LoftTalk that I think deserves far more attention.

Communication doesn’t suddenly become important only when somebody speaks English.

Our schools are multilingual communities.

Some pupils are developing English alongside another home language. Others are studying languages through the curriculum. International schools may have pupils moving between several languages every day.

A pupil’s spoken communication profile can therefore be far more complicated than a single English-language performance suggests.

LoftTalk’s multilingual capability was designed so that structured speaking and feedback are not confined to English alone.

For me, that opens up a much more interesting educational conversation.

Imagine a pupil who can structure sophisticated ideas confidently in one language but appears much less fluent in English.

That potentially tells us something very different from:

“This pupil isn’t good at speaking.”

The barrier may not be the thinking.

It may be the language currently available to express that thinking.

That distinction matters enormously, particularly when supporting multilingual and EAL learners.

Assessment shouldn’t mean scoring every conversation

There is a danger here.

As soon as something becomes an educational priority, schools understandably begin thinking about how to evidence it.

And suddenly:

“Oracy matters”

can become:

“We need to record an oracy score for every child every half term.”

Please don’t.

Good oracy assessment should not mean teachers carrying a clipboard around every lesson trying to score every conversation.

Assessment should serve teaching.

Not the other way around.

I would much rather see schools establish sensible assessment points.

A baseline.

Purposeful opportunities to teach and practise communication.

Another assessment point.

Then ask:

What changed?

That’s meaningful.

Speaking is different in different situations

This is another reason assessing oracy is complicated.

There isn’t one type of speaking.

A pupil might be brilliant in a conversation with a friend but find a formal presentation incredibly difficult.

Another might deliver a beautifully prepared speech but struggle when somebody asks an unexpected follow-up question.

Another may thrive in discussion but struggle to organise an individual extended response.

LoftTalk therefore allows schools to work with different forms of spoken response rather than assuming one speaking task tells us everything about a pupil. Learning Loft’s public LoftTalk materials include structured speaking tasks and progression tracking across different contexts. (see how LoftTalk works)

The principle is simple:

Don’t judge a child’s entire communication ability from one performance.

Give them different reasons to speak.

Give them different audiences.

Allow preparation sometimes.

Require spontaneous thinking at other times.

Listen to what changes.

Oracy assessment should tell us what to teach next

This, for me, is the whole point.

Suppose a pupil has fantastic ideas but struggles to organise them verbally.

Their next step may be learning a simple spoken structure:

My main point is…

The reason I think this is…

An example is…

Therefore…

Another pupil may have excellent structure but use very general vocabulary.

Their next step is different.

Another might deliver a brilliant prepared presentation but struggle to listen and respond during conversation.

Again, different teaching.

This is why I don’t want oracy assessment to become another accountability exercise.

The assessment should change what happens next.

And oracy shouldn’t belong only to English teachers

This matters enormously.

A historian needs to explain causation.

A scientist needs to articulate a hypothesis.

A mathematician may need to justify a method.

A geographer needs to evaluate evidence.

A business student needs to defend a recommendation.

Those are simultaneously subject skills and communication skills.

The government’s planned secondary framework recognises this wider role by bringing oracy, reading and writing together and supporting their development across the curriculum.

So instead of telling every department:

“You need to do more oracy.”

I’d ask them:

“What does excellent spoken communication sound like in your subject?”

That’s a much more useful question.

What LoftTalk actually does

This is where I think technology can solve a very practical problem.

Traditional oracy assessment is difficult to scale.

A teacher cannot listen closely to 30 pupils simultaneously.

They cannot accurately remember every response afterwards.

And asking staff to listen to hours of recordings at home rather defeats the purpose of technology reducing workload.

LoftTalk allows schools to set structured speaking tasks, capture pupil responses and retain the evidence behind assessment. Current LoftTalk functionality includes automatic transcription, rubric-based assessment, teacher review and class-level information to help schools identify patterns and track progress over time. (see how LoftTalk works)

Teachers remain part of that process.

That’s important to me.

Technology can process the response.

It can help identify patterns.

It can organise evidence.

But a teacher understands the child.

The technology should do the heavy lifting. The professional should make the professional decisions.

What about quieter pupils?

This is possibly one of my favourite things about assessing spoken responses differently.

Traditional classroom discussion naturally favours some pupils.

You ask a question.

Five hands shoot up.

Quite often they’re the same five hands.

Meanwhile, another pupil may have an incredibly thoughtful response that nobody ever hears.

When every pupil has an opportunity to record and submit a spoken response, we hear voices that can otherwise disappear in whole-class discussion.

That’s valuable educationally.

And it also challenges our assumptions about who the “good speakers” actually are.

Six questions I’d ask before introducing oracy assessment

If you’re a headteacher, English lead or oracy lead thinking about this, I wouldn’t start by buying software.

I’d start here.

1. What do we currently mean by good oracy?

Could your staff answer that consistently?

2. Where do pupils genuinely have opportunities to speak?

Not where the lesson plan says “discussion”.

Where are pupils actually explaining, questioning, debating, presenting and responding?

3. Are we teaching communication explicitly?

“Discuss with your partner” is an activity.

It isn’t necessarily teaching.

4. Which pupils aren’t being heard?

Who rarely contributes?

And do we actually know what they can do?

5. Can we identify progress?

If oracy is on your school improvement plan, what will pupils be able to do in six months that they cannot do now?

6. Is our approach manageable?

If assessing oracy creates hours of additional teacher administration, something has gone wrong.

LoftTalk isn’t the oracy strategy

I think this distinction is essential.

LoftTalk can give schools structure.

It can capture spoken evidence.

It can support assessment.

It can make progress more visible.

It can support multilingual speaking.

It can give teachers and leaders information they previously struggled to collect consistently.

But LoftTalk isn’t an oracy strategy on its own.

Schools still need talk-rich classrooms.

Teachers still need professional development.

Pupils still need explicit teaching.

Departments still need to understand what effective communication looks like in their disciplines.

Children still need opportunities to debate, explain, question, present, disagree and listen.

Technology shouldn’t replace any of that.

It should help us understand whether it’s working.

The question has changed

For a long time, the education debate was:

Does oracy matter?

I don’t think that’s the interesting question anymore.

We know communication matters.

The questions I’d rather schools ask now are:

What does excellent spoken communication look like?

How do we teach it?

How do we assess it fairly?

How do we identify pupils who need support?

How do we recognise strengths that traditional classroom participation might miss?

How does communication develop across different languages?

And how do we know whether our oracy strategy is actually making a difference?

Those were the questions behind LoftTalk.

Creating the UK’s first Oracy Age assessment tool wasn’t about finding another thing to measure.

Quite the opposite.

It was about taking something incredibly important that schools have traditionally found difficult to see — and making it visible enough to teach better.

Because if we’re going to tell children that their voices matter, we should probably get much better at listening to them.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is LoftTalk?

LoftTalk is Learning Loft’s oracy assessment tool. It allows schools to capture spoken responses, assess aspects of communication, retain evidence and track pupil development over time. It includes an Oracy Age alongside more detailed information about the pupil’s spoken communication.

What is an Oracy Age?

Oracy Age is LoftTalk’s age-related indication of a pupil’s spoken communication development. It is intended to sit alongside more detailed assessment information rather than replacing teacher judgement or reducing communication to a single number.

Can LoftTalk assess pupils in different languages?

LoftTalk has multilingual speaking and feedback capability across six languages, allowing its structured approach to spoken communication to extend beyond English.

Why is multilingual oracy assessment useful?

Multilingual assessment can help schools distinguish between a pupil’s underlying communication skills and the language currently being used to express them. This can be particularly relevant when considering EAL learners and language learning.

Is oracy assessment becoming statutory?

There is not currently a new statutory national oracy test. However, the government has committed to a new primary oracy framework and has said that guidance will include formative assessment and support for pupils’ oracy.

Does LoftTalk replace teacher judgement?

No. Learning Loft’s current LoftTalk materials explicitly retain teacher review within the assessment process. Technology can help capture, transcribe and analyse spoken responses, but professional judgement remains important. (see how LoftTalk works)

Is LoftTalk only for English lessons?

No. Spoken communication is relevant across the curriculum. LoftTalk is designed for structured speaking practice and assessment, while schools decide how oracy is embedded within their curriculum and individual subjects.

Final Thought

I spent years working with oracy before LoftTalk existed.

The difficulty was never convincing me that speaking mattered.

The difficulty was answering:

How do we actually know whether it’s improving?

That’s the problem I wanted LoftTalk to solve.

Not another assessment for assessment’s sake.

Not another spreadsheet.

Not another number.

A way of hearing every pupil, understanding their communication more clearly and giving teachers something useful to act on.

And with oracy moving further up the national education agenda, I think that question is going to become increasingly important for schools:

We teach children to read. We teach them to write. We assess both.

Perhaps it’s time we became just as thoughtful about how we develop — and understand — their voice.