No Writing Allowed

Today is No Pens Day Wednesday, a new initiative aimed to encourage schools to teach the curriculum through speaking and listening activities, with no writing allowed.

The event, devised and organised by the Hello campaign - a collaboration between The Communication Trust and Jean Gross, the Government’s rather ridiculously titled Communication Champion (seriously, Sirralun’s a tsar, she’s a champion?) - focuses on developing children and young people's speaking and listening skills.

Being a natural loudmouth with an opinion on everything, I have always had to (or my teacher had to) restrain my input into the class in order to give everyone a fair opportunity to contribute. But while gobby little madams like me are exhausting our vocal cords, it is a terrifying statistic that the average length of an average pupil’s contribution to a teacher's question is just four words.

Four words. Clearly teachers aren’t asking the right questions.

So in order to focus on these all-important speaking and listening skills that can sometimes get neglected in busy, full classrooms, a day without any writing at all has been introduced.

Jean the champion of the world has explained the reasoning behind the initiative as being all about communication skills for life:

So why have a No Pens Day Wednesday? First, because good communication skills are vital for children and young people's success in learning and in life. Children's vocabulary levels are one of the best predictors of success in GCSEs; language levels are the best predictor of whether a child brought up in poverty will escape poverty as an adult. Two thirds of children and young people with behaviour difficulties have speech, language and communication difficulties. So do 60% of young offenders and 88% of long-term unemployed young men. 47% of employers say they can't get recruits with the spoken communication skills needed for today's service industries.

Children and young people who find communication hard find life hard. That is why speaking and listening has to be as important in the classroom as literacy, numeracy and subject knowledge. Too often it gets pushed to the sidelines in the stampede to achieve targets and raise standards. No Pens Day Wednesday will provide a practical demonstration that this doesn't have to be the case.

The second reason for having No Pens Day Wednesday is about school improvement. Higher standards won't be achieved without proper attention to oral language. Ofsted have repeatedly said that outstanding schools are ones where language is a priority. Great programmes like Cambridge University's 'Thinking Together' have provided hard evidence of improvements in test scores in maths and science following an increase in collaborative group work and class discussion.

Other research has shown that the typical pattern of talk in classrooms is the teacher asking 'closed' questions testing recall of facts, followed by pupil responses averaging four words. This just doesn't give children – particularly those who may have little exposure to reasoned discussion at home – sufficient exposure to good models, or practice in their use.

The free No Pens Day Wednesday lesson plans are about getting pupils to debate, plan and deliver oral presentations, make podcasts, use techniques like think-pair-share and think-pair-square, snowballing, jigsaw and barrier games. They are really fun.

And they aren't meant in any sense to displace writing as an essential activity. The materials ask pupils to reflect, after the day, on what helped their learning, what activities they would like to use again – and on those moments during the day when they really wished they had a pen so they could write something down.

Reading Gross’ excellent blog on the Guardian Teacher Network site got me thinking about communication skills and what they mean in schools and in the wider world.

Speaking and listening skills are the key to being able to engage with the world as a functional, useful member of society. Knowing the correct register of language to choose, feeling confident enough to express a view and being able to use language in order to get what you want are absolutely fundamental to succeeding on a daily basis.

Confident speaking skills are also essential in the majority of workplaces. People need to realise that these skills do not always come naturally and have to be fostered in schools alongside literacy and numeracy. And this isn’t just a job for English teachers. Speaking and listening skills need to be emphasised in all classrooms.

In my first ever ‘office job’, an internship at a PR agency, I quickly realised the importance of good speaking and listening skills. In an industry that centres around communication, the people that were the best were interesting, confident and articulate speakers. That summer, I was lucky enough to sit at a desk next to a very accomplished personification of these skills. What I noticed was that when he was on the phone, speaking to a journalist, I could imagine that the person on the other end must be having some of the best ten minutes of their morning. There was no way you’d want to hang up on him. He had the ability to engage and amuse, all while fluently getting his point across. No mean feat indeed.

It doesn’t come easy. I remember my first call during the same internship. I felt like everyone’s ears were on stalks (quite why I thought anyone would have the time or energy to bother listening in I don’t know) and like I had suddenly lost the ability to think and speak at the same time. But it does get easier every time.

That’s why we need to be practising these skills with our students, giving them a voice in classrooms so they can have one in the world. It’s about asking the right questions, giving them the time and space to speak and the confidence to express themselves out loud. I think No Pens Day Wednesday is a great step in the right direction and I look forward to reading more about reactions to the initiative in the coming days.