Elly Hayward, Head of English at Pangbourne College, shares her reflections on achievable next steps to start making changes following an inspiring CPD session.

Like many of those working in schools, I’ve found getting back to face-to-face CPD with professionals and colleagues is brilliant. After recently attending NACE’s member meetup on the theme “Speaking up: developing oracy for high achievement”, I came away buzzing with ideas, keen to feedback and also plot and plan as to how to drive forwards this key skill at Pangbourne College.  

But what’s the reality of actually doing that? How easy is it in our busy school lives to act upon and embed our newfound knowledge into our school culture? When’s a good time to broach a whole-school initiative and is that necessarily the first step?

Here are my musings on the matter and perhaps, even in the process of writing how I might go about this, I may find myself one step closer to realisation in my own school context.

1) Feedback to someone… anyone! 

I used a department meeting to consolidate my thoughts from the day and to pass on some of the excitement that I felt about what I’d seen and shared. I also reflected on a lot of the good things that we are already doing in our department (always good to big up your department with what they are already doing well!). As an English Department, we usually find ourselves at the forefront of anything to do with presentations, debates, talking in public. And we do it pretty well. But what I also realised whilst feeding the information back was that I was sure that good things were happening elsewhere in the school – and that’s, perhaps, where to start.

2) Find some time. 

I can hear your teacherly guffawing from here. Time is something we have precious little of and as not only a Head of Department but a working mum and wearer of many hats, I needed to be seriously realistic about where my priorities lie and what might actually be achievable. 

Without taking the lead on a whole-school development strategy in one fell swoop, I thought smaller. Microscopic in fact. I can hear my line manager’s words ringing in my ears already: “Don’t take on too much… We all need to strike that balance between trying to do everything and doing less, well.” I would do well to heed the latter. 

It’s not a question of whether improving students’ oracy skills will raise the attainment of all students; it was clear from the evidence presented at the NACE meetup that it will. Instead, the questions need to be: Does this align with whole-school strategies and development plans? What are the school’s priorities this academic year and next? What impact will this have in my context? And coming back to my first point, what are we already doing well?

3) Find out what’s already going on that’s good. 

This is my next step and the point where I find myself now. My plan – as Chloe Bateman suggested in her presentation at the meetup (summarised in this blog post) – is to find out what’s already good in my school. I have an awareness (you’d hope so!) of what is happening oracy-wise in the English Department but I’m acutely aware that it is not just the job of the English staff to develop and promote good oracy skills. My intention is to send a survey out to teachers asking them to firstly outline what oracy is, as I’m not sure many label it as such, and give concrete examples of where they develop this skill in their subject.

4) Start with small wins.

This is something that is key to our department philosophy and my approach to many things. Sharing what is already being done to promote good oracy by finding those nuggets and celebrating them with colleagues before introducing more ideas for staff to possibly adapt into their lessons. This may take the form of delivering a session of CPD or a presentation at one of our academic meetings or INSET, or it may be as simple as sending out a short video of “Have you tried…?” ideas. Chloe shared some great advice about “enhancing our existing curriculum, rather than distracting from it.” I will certainly also be following up with some of the other ideas shared at the meetup – but one step at a time!

Even in writing down my thought process, I feel fired up again. My eye-line has risen just above the mire of lessons, marking, administration and school events to look at that bigger picture about making a long-term, significant change to the way oracy is perceived in our school and, ultimately, raising our students’ confidence and skills in communication.

Elly Hayward is Head of English at Pangbourne College. You can follow her on Twitter @PangCollEnglish

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