Giving oracy parity status with literacy can be part of a game-changing response to the opportunities and risks of AI. But only if we lay down our weapons. 

Please, let’s not mess up what might be the most important educational reform of our age over the pointless battle of knowledge versus skills.  We must move beyond short-sighted and obsolete political point-scoring and fears of ‘dumbing-down’, as Roy Blatchford describes in his September 2026 column "Burying the academic-vocational apartheid".  In reconciling these historic flashpoints we need strategic storytellers and rigorous researchers. 

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Two of my favourite writers and speakers on AI in education are Daisy Christodoulou and Peter Hyman. As far as I can tell, Daisy and Peter agree on many things and hold a great respect for each other. They are serious, brilliant, and care deeply about the consequences of their words. I would happily have either of them (or both) lead the education of young people.

They don’t always agree, but the ways in which they express their differences are good examples of the “productive friction” we should be keen to retain in our education system. Peter is the strategic storyteller, Daisy the rigorous researcher. Their points and style of disagreement are particularly helpful for making sense of the competing priorities and politics of education. Let me try to illustrate.

Back in August, I published a LinkedIn article (framed as an open letter to the Secretary of State for Education) revisiting the landmark 2017 report, The Forgotten Third, and highlighting the growing value of oracy skills in the highly disruptive age of AI. As the line between human and machine authorship becomes impossible to determine, oracy may be the best evidence of our human authenticity and our best defence in a ‘post-literate’ age. The rules of engagement for text production and educational assessment must recognise that large language models (LLMs) are a game-changer. Oracy may be the best way to address falling levels of pupil engagement and confidence in education.

Two months later, to the delight of those who have been campaigning for this goal for many years, Lucy Powell made a government policy announcement intended to give oracy parity status with literacy in the education system.

In response, there have been some anxious and reactionary online counter-arguments. These are rooted in an irrational fear that change inevitably means loss of quality. They echo my time in the media and entertainment sector twenty years ago, a time when wiki platforms and user-generated content were challenging traditional editorial quality controls. They created an unpoliced frontier in media analogous to the American Old West, and the metaphor of the wiki wild west was something I explored in my book, Patrons, Curators, Inventors & Thieves (Palgrave 2014).

The difference this time around is that the battleground for preservation of standards is education rather than media.

Daisy’s recent article “Why are we making these mistakes again?” (Substack, October 25th) addresses several of these concerns very well. In particular, the chasm between announcing a pleasing policy headline and navigating the rigour, resources, and risks required for implementing measures that can actually deliver on the promise of that headline..

To be clear, Daisy’s piece is more a challenge to the government’s other policies (vocational qualifications from age 14 and generic skills assessment) than specifically to Lucy Powell’s oracy announcement. But the section that offers the most insight into the productive friction between her and Peter is her commentary on political rhetoric.

Noting that Peter was a speechwriter for Tony Blair, Daisy points out how effectively he uses the rhetorical technique of “both…and” - a hallmark of Blair’s Third Way that sought to reconcile competing positions across the political spectrum. Daisy’s concern is that current politicians may be exploiting this technique with less integrity and without doing the hard yards of research and planning. Nor are they challenging some of their own party’s most cherished views as a necessary, if painful, step toward reconciling competing priorities. As Amol Rajan put to Daisy in his podcast interview this week,why is it that some proven pedagogical principles and practices, previously championed by the political left as the route to greater fairness in society, have now become right-coded? By "right-coded" I assume he means that an academically meritocratic high-stakes national assessment system is now seen as narrowly selective and inequitable.

This brings me back to the question behind the image heading this post: “Does this have to be a fight?”

There are several dimensions of pedagogy and assessment that are often framed over-simplistically as a zero-sum contest where one side can only succeed to the detriment of the other e.g.:


These are unhelpful binaries. Who would want to see any one side of these pairings discredited?

The real issue is failing to accept that the primary resource constraint in education is time. Specifically, pupil-attention time. When governments move the goalposts and add new expectations for teachers and schools in response to social and economic pressures, they routinely forget to take things away. Resources and learning become spread increasingly thin, with predictable damage to quality and to teacher and pupil morale.

In response, effective education leaders know that "less is more" and they learn how to make the appropriate trade-offs without compromising educational integrity.

For this reason, during a recent planning meeting for the recruitment of a new Chief Education Officer at The Skinners’​ Company, we rejected a suggestion to ask candidates what they thought of current government policy. The average tenure of education leaders is far longer than that of Secretaries of State for Education, so discussions of current policy have a short shelf-life. Far better to let candidates explain how they reconcile competing demands on schools, a question that naturally reveals their hierarchy of values and longer-term priorities.

Finally, back to the question of oracy, the topic I care about most.

At first glance, the title of Daisy’s article made my heart sink. In the 12 years I’ve worked in education (following 25 years in business), the frequently heard phrases that infuriate me the most are the patronizing and defeatist lines: “Ah, you need to understand that we tried that X years ago and it doesn’t work. Let’s not make the same mistakes again.”

I worried for a moment that Daisy might be taking that same line regarding oracy and oral assessment. But she isn’t. She agrees that there is significant potential to innovate with AI in oral assessment, citing useful comparative judgment research conducted through her company, No More Marking. She also points out that it is a mistake to think that a focus on oracy is a simple fix to the problem of The Forgotten Third. I agree. It is not a simple fix. It is an another channel - a broadening in the repertoire of learning and pupil engagement - that has been under-utilised for decades.

System-wide innovation in this area of educational reform will not be easy for the government to pull off. The most disastrous route would be to add oral assessments back into GCSEs crudely and prematurely, and without the necessary strategic thinking, planning, and sustained investment in research and training. There is a fundamental difference between assessing oracy skills and using oral methods to assess other knowledge and skills. Conflating the two is counter-productive, and the cultural obstacles must not be underestimated.

Young children learn to listen and to speak long before they read and write, but our system does not formally recognise this essential part of our human development. This is why I support a holistic approach, building confidence in oral assessment from a young age. It is important to design and introduce oral assessment early, in a “low-stakes” way, to normalise the practice and minimise stress for pupils and parents.

Building from a secure base, oral assessment can then expand and adapt to form part of a balanced assessment offering - one flexible enough to ensure no child is disadvantaged or disengaged by a one-size-fits-all system. The tentative four-stage example for Year 5 (outlined in my August article) could serve as a starting point for discussion.

Oral confidence leads nicely into initiatives to address the much talked-about drop-off in pupil engagement during Key Stage 3 such as the KS3Alliance led by Rebecca Boomer-Clark and Dame Lesley Powell, and the various projects arising from Alan Milburn’s powerful recent report on NEETs.

None of this means ditching a national examination system. It means leveraging oracy for learner engagement, and embracing change to adapt our educational system to a very different world.

To achieve this we need both our strategic storytellers and our rigorous researchers.