The National Oracy Project

This chapter provides a summary of the work of the teachers and others who participated in the The National Oracy Project, focusing in part on the work of secondary English teachers but also acknowledging that the project was, in terms of age range and subject coverage, one of the biggest curriculum development projects seen in the English-speaking world. The National Oracy Project was really a network of local education agency projects, which in their turn were also networks of school and classroom research and development projects. Schools and teachers were also able to choose the particular areas they wanted to focus on. As their confidence in organising and managing more active learning situations grew, teachers had more opportunity to consider some of the more complex issues of oracy — gender and talk, linguistic diversity and variety, and children’s special needs. The National Oracy Project and its members and officers were from 1987 working through an unparalleled period of extensive change.