Here is Alastair Campbell's foreword to our project's forthcoming book Oracy: The Politics of Speech Education, due out early in 2025.

Alastair Campbell is one of the UK's leading political commentators and podcasters and former director of communications for Prime Minister Tony Blair. 

We are in so many ways what we say, and how we say it. Yet, while we all immediately know what literacy and numeracy are, oracy has yet to achieve the same status with the public or, bar a few good exceptions, policymakers.

In the modern age we have to be able to teach our children to communicate clearly. If we are serious about equality in society, then ensuring all children know how to use their voice in all situations where a voice is required is something we need to address. We need to ensure all children have a voice. We need to put how we teach listening and speaking on the same par as literacy and numeracy.

 Learning how to stand up and speak to an audience can be nerve wracking. Glossophobia – the fear of speaking in public – is up there with snakes and spiders as a fear. Conquer those nerves and it is great for confidence. But oracy doesn’t mean public speaking as in standing up and making speeches. It is about public speaking when you’re dealing with bureaucracy. When you’re trying to get something done over the phone. When you’re negotiating with your landlord. When you’re in a stop and search situation. When you’re trying to deal with people when you open a bank account. And it’s not just about confidence but about empathy; that comes from learning to understand other people’s positions and enter their mindset.

 It also doesn’t mean young people all need to sound like the King’s English. We shouldn’t get obsessed with standardised English. There’s no such thing. Oracy isn’t about getting people to talk the same way. Being proud of your accent or where you are from is not inconsistent with speaking effectively. It just means giving people the space and confidence to say what they have to say as effectively as possible.

 How do we achieve this? We need to start with teaching people how to speak in state schools. Here in the United Kingdom, oracy is coming to the top of the agenda. It was good to see the Labour Party commit to oracy as one of its core education policies. 

 In both Scotland and Wales, they have got the message that oracy is good not just for confidence and wellbeing, but for deeper thinking in the classroom. The Scottish education system defines oracy as ‘listening and talking’ – pretty simple – and in theory at least it stands on a par with reading and writing. Likewise, the Welsh Government has embraced oracy across the curriculum.

In England, meanwhile, Tory education ministers have long dismissed oracy as ‘sitting around chatting’. As with so much the Conservative government did, they talked the talk about removing the barriers that hold people back, but in their deeds, they kept those barriers high, lest power, wealth and opportunity slip from the few to the many.

I spoke recently at a conference of teachers, where Professor Neil Mercer from the University of Cambridge gave a presentation. He asked for a show of hands among the several hundred teachers present – who had been taught speaking skills at school? A relatively small number of hands went up. He asked them to lower their hands if they had gone to private schools. The hands left in the air could now be counted on a couple of fingers.

State schools need to give everyone from all backgrounds access to these skills. It doesn’t solve everything, of course not. But it is an important start.

This would help broaden the gene pool of politics too. One of the messages of my recent book But What Can I Do? Is that we need to broaden the political gene pool, and that means developing the confidence of the 93% who attend state schools, so that it at least matches the confidence of those in the top private schools, who are taught to believe that to rule is their right.

Remember: Eton College has produced three times as many prime ministers as the Labour Party in its entire history. Eton’s most recent prime minister would have struggled to get a job managing a bus depot, let alone running a country with a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, had he not been born into privilege, then taught supreme self-confidence at school and in university.

The people in this book are trying to work out how we can do this. It won’t be easy and people won’t all agree on what needs to be done. But we can all agree that society, politics and most of all young people need effective, confident, authentic communication more than ever.