Monday 15 December 2025
Summary
- The recent curriculum review’s call for an oracy framework in the UK is welcome but could go further given today’s challenges and the lessons we have learnt from ten years delivering The Orwell Youth Prize programme.
- Schools remain dominated by an exam-driven culture that rewards memorisation over curiosity, preventing students from developing the deeper thinking and reasoning skills needed for active citizenship.
- Media literacy must go beyond spotting misinformation to teaching students to interrogate power, motives, and the production of misleading information: skills rooted in open discussion, debate, and critical questioning.
- A strengthened oracy framework, embedded across the curriculum and supported by teacher training, is essential for building democratic habits; without it, young people risk holding strong views without the ability to express them, listen to others, or engage in respectful dialogue, the same skills which The Orwell Youth Prize aims to cultivate.
The recent publication of the Curriculum and Assessment Review recommends that government introduce an oracy framework to complement pre-existing, successful frameworks in reading and writing. This is welcome news and, alongside the decision to make citizenship compulsory in primary schools, is a worthwhile attempt to rebalance the curriculum. More widely, it also proposes that pupils should learn media and financial literacy, law and rights, democracy and government, and climate education from an early age.
These are important and overdue amendments: the Orwell Foundation has been calling for such changes for some time, rooted in our experience working with young people through our innovative The Orwell Youth Prize programme. We welcome these recommendations and look forward to supporting them through the work of the Orwell Youth Prize, our resources and events. However, we might too recommend bolder action on critical skills.
The purposes of education are manifold and contested, but most accounts converge on one of two core aims: to prepare young people for the future and to help them flourish as citizens and individuals. The present system does neither adequately. While the reduction of exams by ten per cent suggested by the review is a start, it does not get to the heart of the problem.
As our entrants consistently tell us, the exam treadmill continues to define the experience of school life. This has, unsurprisingly, created a culture where teaching to the test replaces the capacity to be curious—we know from our experiences that many schools don’t have the time to encourage it—and memorising facts becomes more important than actually understanding and exploring ideas themselves.
Indeed, if education is to prepare young people to understand and respond to the great challenges of our time—from climate change to democratic decline, inequality, and post-truth—it must do more than train them to recall information. It must give them the skills to think, reason, and communicate effectively for themselves.
For instance, while the proposal for the expansion of media literacy is useful, it is not enough for students simply to identify when information is reliable—recent research even suggests that young people are often better at spotting misinformation than many adults. Young people will no doubt benefit from such a focus, as we all would, but what matters is whether they are equipped to ask why misleading information arises, who produces it, and to what ends.
These are questions of power and motive, not just about factual accuracy. They demand the capacity to interrogate, debate, and understand the world—and have wider consequences for citizenship. For young people to become effective citizens, they need to develop skills “such as expressing opinions, listening to others’ points of view, and agreeing and disagreeing respectfully.” That requires teachers who are confident in facilitating discussion and students who are encouraged to speak, listen, and challenge one another respectfully. Here, the promised oracy framework is vital and we believe it should be expanded beyond the English or Drama lesson and, indeed, beyond the classroom.
Open and respectful discussion and disagreement is central to our democratic life; good practice for the difficult conversations that we must have in shaping our nation. However, many teachers today are discouraged from allowing open discussion in the classroom for fear that it might become “too controversial”. When debate is shut down, there is a risk that young people retreat to online echo chambers, and their thinking is not tested, so is neither scrutinised for held to account. This runs the risk of divisive views becoming deeply internalised.
We live in an age of information overload. According to Ofcom, on average, young people in the UK consume between five and six hours of online content a day, are often better informed than their parents, yet often struggle to find those spaces for genuine exchange. Many report feeling isolated and disconnected, less likely to form close relationships than previous generations. The result are paradoxical: more information, but less peer-to-peer understanding; more connections, but less of a sense of community; less connectivity between young people to go into the future together.
We suggest that the government widen its ambitions for the upcoming oracy framework, embedding it in the curriculum beyond English and Drama, matched with teacher training and resources to better support and facilitate these conversations which are so fundamental to the future of our society; and the practice of good citizenship within it. Without them, we risk producing a generation with strong views, but who are unable to articulate those views or engage in dialogue with others effectively.
As George Orwell reminds us, although “tolerance and decency are deeply rooted in England…they are not indestructible, and they have to be kept alive partly by conscious effort.” Education could and should do this, as a place where young people practise the habits of democracy—listening, reasoning, disagreeing without rancour—before they can even vote, and perhaps learn something of themselves in the process.
The Orwell Youth Prize is currently open for entries on the theme ‘TRUTH’. Find out more and browse our teacher’s resources.
