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Quick summary: The government is introducing a new oracy framework for schools in England, and speaking and listening will have equal status with reading and writing in the revised national curriculum from September 2028. That matters because oracy builds young people’s confidence and self-esteem, and their chances in work and life. Make (Good) Trouble has spent years helping young people find their voice, and we’re building on our work to help them have their say, to network and developing agency to shape their futures.

Earlier this month, the Education Secretary announced that speaking and listening will have equal status with reading and writing in England’s revised national curriculum. A new national oracy framework will sit at the heart of that change.

At Make (Good) Trouble, we’ve been saying this for years. Being able to speak up, and to be properly listened to, shouldn’t be an extra for young people. It’s at the root of their confidence, their self-esteem and their chances in the world of work.

So we’re delighted. And we want to use this moment to tell you what we’ve learned, and where we’re heading next.

What is the oracy framework?

The oracy framework is new Department for Education guidance for schools in England on teaching speaking and listening. There will be a primary oracy framework and a combined oracy, reading and writing framework for secondary schools, alongside the revised national curriculum from September 2028.

Oracy is the ability to speak and listen well: putting your ideas into words, making sense of things through talk, and engaging with other people. The government wants every child in England to leave school able to do this with confidence.

Here’s what’s been announced so far:

  • A new primary oracy framework. Guidance to help primary teachers make sure children are confident speakers and listeners by the end of Key Stage 2.
  • A combined secondary framework bringing oracy, reading and writing together, so speaking and listening are built into every subject, not just English.
  • Practical support for teachers. Tips, tried-and-tested strategies and examples of what works, building on the existing reading and writing frameworks.
  • Equal status in the curriculum. On 15 October 2026, Education Secretary Lucy Powell told school trust leaders in Birmingham that oracy will become a brand-new strand of the English curriculum, with spoken language a core part of curriculum and assessment up to GCSE.
  • A place in inspection. Ofsted has confirmed that oracy now features in its inspection framework.

The commitment came out of the independent Curriculum and Assessment Review, which made an oracy framework its first recommendation in November 2025. That followed the Oracy Commission’s 2024 report, We Need to Talk, which called for oracy to be treated as a ‘fourth R’. The revised curriculum is due for first teaching from September 2028, and the full framework is still to be published.

How does oracy affect life chances?

Strong speaking and listening skills are linked to better results at school, better job prospects and greater social mobility. But access to them is unequal.

The Education Secretary argued that for too long, oracy has been ‘a marker of privilege’. Some young people get endless chances to debate, present and perform. Many don’t. 

That gap shapes life chances. The English-Speaking Union’s Why Oracy Matters report found good spoken language skills are crucial to social mobility, school attainment and later success in education and work. And the Oracy APPG’s Speak for Change inquiry found unemployed young people were almost twice as likely as their peers to feel school hadn’t given them the speaking skills they needed for later life.

Why does oracy matter for young people?

Oracy is often talked about as a skill for learning. It is. But in our experience, it’s about much more than that. It’s about whether a young person believes their voice counts.

It builds confidence and self-esteem. When a young person says something out loud and someone really listens, it changes how they see themselves. Do that often enough and it becomes part of who they are. Go without it, and staying quiet becomes a habit that’s hard to break.

It opens doors to work. Interviews, networking, asking for help, pitching an idea, speaking up in a meeting. So much of getting on at work comes down to talk. Yet only four in ten 8 to 18-year-olds told the National Literacy Trust they feel good at speaking in front of an audience. And in the Institute of Student Employers’ 2025 survey, 42% of employers said school and college leavers fell short on verbal communication, up from 22% two years earlier.

It gives young people agency. Being able to put your case, ask the awkward question, or challenge a decision that affects you is how young people shape their own lives. It’s also how they help shape the services, schools and communities around them.

As we wrote recently in Young people aren’t the problem, this isn’t a failing in young people. Many of the places where they used to practise, from Saturday jobs to youth clubs to drama lessons, have shrunk or disappeared. Confidence comes from practice, and practice needs opportunity.

Two work experience students at Wakehurst interviewing each other to record a podcast about their week.

How can young people build confidence in speaking up?

Young people build speaking confidence through practice: real tasks, in a safe space, with adults who take them seriously. That’s what we’ve learned from years of helping young people find their voice.

Giving young people a voice is what Make (Good) Trouble was set up to do. Everything we make, we co-produce with young people, so they speak for themselves rather than being spoken for. Along the way, oracy has been at the heart of our work, even when we didn’t call it that.

The skills young people gain with us are recognised through RSA Cities of Learning digital badges, with more than 150 awarded so far.

One parent told us their son, who had found life immensely difficult, had become ‘more confident, more positive, dealing with tricky situations better’. That’s what finding your voice looks like.

Beyond the classroom: what’s next for Make (Good) Trouble

The oracy framework is a big step, and we’ll be cheering schools on. But it won’t be in classrooms until 2028. And young people need chances to be heard in lots of places, not just lessons: in youth clubs, at work, in their communities and in the decisions made about them.

That’s where we come in. Over the coming months, we’ll be building on our work to help young people:

  • Have a say. Speaking up about the things that matter to them, and being listened to by the people and organisations who make decisions.
  • Network with confidence. Walking into a room of strangers, introducing themselves, and building the contacts that too often depend on who your parents know.
  • Take the lead. Developing the agency to shape their own futures, and to bring about the change they want to see.

This is already part of the workshops we offer. Take a look at our Media Training Workshops and Creative Workshops. We’re also building an oracy programme for young people. More on this soon! In the meantime, we’d love to hear from schools, charities, youth services, employers and funders who want to be part of what’s next.

Oracy framework FAQs

When will the oracy framework be published?

The Department for Education hasn’t confirmed a publication date yet. The revised national curriculum, including the new oracy frameworks, is due for first teaching in schools from September 2028.

Is oracy now part of the national curriculum?

It will be. On 15 October 2026, Education Secretary Lucy Powell announced that oracy will become a new strand of the English curriculum, with equal status to reading and writing. Ofsted already looks at oracy in school inspections.

What’s the difference between oracy and public speaking?

Public speaking is one part of oracy. Oracy also covers listening, discussion, explaining your thinking and talking with others in everyday situations, from a classroom debate to a job interview.

Does oracy only happen in schools?

No. Young people build speaking and listening skills in youth clubs, part-time jobs, drama, volunteering and community projects. Many of those opportunities have shrunk, so work outside school matters too.

How can my organisation work with Make (Good) Trouble?

We run media training, creative and podcast workshops, and youth voice research for schools, charities, councils and employers. Get in touch

What you can do…

If you work with young people and want them to feel confident speaking up, whether that’s in front of a journalist, an interview panel or a room full of decision-makers, get in touch. We’d love to hear what they need.

And if you think young people deserve to be heard, please share this post.

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In November 1920, thousands of women wrote to the government asking to join the ceremony at Westminster Abbey for the Unknown Warrior. Each of them was convinced that he was her son.

It’s a story that stops you in your tracks. It’s also, I expect, one you never heard at school. Our young team found it while asking a simple question: what did the First World War do to women’s mental health?

With Remembrance Sunday 2026 on 8 November and Armistice Day on Wednesday 11 November, many of you will be planning lessons, assemblies and tutor time right now. If you’d like to take a different angle this year, or start something bigger with your students, we have just the thing. We Are Poppy is a free set of Remembrance resources for secondary schools, exploring how the First World War affected women’s mental health.

What is the We Are Poppy project?

We Are Poppy explores how the First World War affected women’s mental health. It was developed in 2020 by young people aged 14 to 19 from Hove Park School, the East Sussex Youth Cabinet and the Make (Good) Trouble team, with support from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

Our team knew about soldiers and shellshock, but the women’s side of the story was new to them. As Amelie, 14, told us, “it hadn’t even occurred to me that the women would get shellshock”.

Then the pandemic lockdown hit, and planned archive visits were cancelled. So the team went digging online instead. They found Mabel Lethbridge, a 17-year-old munitions worker who lost a leg in a factory explosion. They read about nurses at the front who were simply sent home when they showed signs of what we’d now call PTSD.

To make sense of it all, they invented Poppy, a fictional young woman living through the war. Imagining her life helped them connect with the real women they were reading about. It all came together in Dear Poppy, a podcast that imagines a conversation between today’s teenagers and the young women of 1914-18 – women who fought, nursed and kept the home fires burning. It was broadcast on BBC Radio Sussex and BBC Radio Surrey on Remembrance Sunday 2020.

Listen to the We Are Poppy podcast

What resources are available for schools?

Everything lives on wearepoppy.org, so you can dip in for one lesson or use the lot. It also works well for Women’s History Month or Mental Health Awareness Week.

A great place to start is the 29-minute podcast, which mixes letters, diaries, medical records and expert interviews. You’ll also find full interviews with historian Professor Lucy Noakes, historian and therapist Denise Poynter, and trauma therapist Darren Abrahams.

For classroom planning, download our Schools Pack. It’s free to download, aimed at secondary-age students and has five lessons:

  1. Introduction and podcast: meet the project and listen to Dear Poppy.
  2. Life in the First World War: explore women’s lives through seven real stories.
  3. Shining a light on mental health: look at trauma and shellshock, then and now.
  4. Recreating Poppy in the classroom: build a character and write letters across time.
  5. Make your own podcast: turn the research into audio.

A quick note before you start: the material covers trauma, loss and serious injury, and one section of student writing touches on sexual assault and harassment. It’s worth reading and listening first.

How to create a student research podcast about WW1

This is the bit we’re most excited about, because the site gives you what you need for students to make their own version. You don’t need a studio, either. Our team made Dear Poppy entirely remotely, recording on mobile phones and over video calls.

Here’s one way to do it:

  1. Create your Poppy. Students decide who she is, where she lives and what she did during the war, using our Poppy worksheet.
  2. Do the research. Our resources page points to the Imperial War Museum, The National Archives, The British Newspaper Archive and nurses’ diaries online. Local archives are great for finding women from your own area.
  3. Write to Poppy. Students write a letter to Poppy, then reply in her voice. This activity really fired up our team, and it’s a lovely standalone task if you only have one lesson.
  4. Shape the story. Start with the audience, then plan a beginning, middle and end. It could be a drama, a series of interviews, a group conversation or a mix.
  5. Record it. Students can interview each other, a historian or a relative with a family story, then add their own sound effects. Our podcast guide has tips on interviewing and recording, plus links to sound effect libraries.

The sound effects can be a highlight. When our sound editor, Alvy Vincent, needed the noise of injured men on a hospital ward, the answer was some home-recorded groaning, tucked quietly into the background. It seems a bit silly, but it’s surprisingly effective!

Teen in First World War and modern dress, from the photoshoot for We Are Poppy - commemorating women in WW1

Share your students’ work

Jane Griffin, the retired teacher who worked with our team, says one of the joys of teaching is offering “a germ of an idea” and watching students take it somewhere you never imagined. That’s exactly what happened with Poppy.

So this Remembrance, why not ask your students who their Poppy might be? Have a look around wearepoppy.org, download the Schools Pack (PDF) and see where it takes you.

If you do make something, please get in touch. We’d love to feature your students’ work on the website. And if you’d like a hand, we also run creative and media workshops for young people.

Frequently asked questions

Who are the We Are Poppy resources for?

The Schools Pack is aimed at secondary-age students, and the website is open to anyone who wants to explore women’s experiences of the First World War.

Do you need special equipment to make a podcast?

No. Our team recorded on mobile phones and over video calls, then edited the audio together with software. Headphones help you check the sound as you record, and a furry windshield is useful outdoors.

Can students use the resources outside Remembrance?

Yes. The lessons explore women’s history, mental health and storytelling, so they work at any time of year.

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Almost every week, I read another report or piece of research that highlights the issues young people face today. Anxious. Glued to their phones. Not “work-ready”.

Despite the doom-laden headlines, we see something different. At Make (Good) Trouble, we run media training, podcast workshops and a holiday drama club for young people. The young people we work with are full of potential, energy, ideas. They turn up, they try new things, and they have plenty to say when someone asks – and listens.

So I want to say two things. First, the problem isn’t young people. It’s the system they’re trying to get into. Second, there are two jobs to do, and we need to do both: help young people build confidence and skills, and change the things that are stacked against them.

In short: nearly a million 16 to 24-year-olds in the UK are not in education, employment or training (often shortened to NEET). That’s one in eight. Yet 84% of those surveyed for the government’s Young People and Work review said they want a job, education or training. Changing that means building young people’s confidence and skills, and fixing a jobs market that isn’t letting them in.

Why are so many young people out of work? It’s the system

If you have any skin in this game, take a look at Young People and Work, the independent review led by Alan Milburn for the Department for Work and Pensions. Its interim report, published in May 2026, tells us that nearly a million 16 to 24-year-olds are not in education, employment or training. That’s one in eight. Six in ten (the majority) of them have never had a job, up from four in ten twenty years ago.

It would be easy to blame young people for that. Milburn doesn’t. His review surveyed young people who are out of work and education, and 84% said they want a job, education or training. What he heard, again and again, was young people applying for dozens of jobs, sometimes hundreds, and hearing nothing back.

More demand-side changes are needed

For years, he says, the answer has been to help young people become more employable, giving them better skills and more help with their CVs. That’s the ‘supply’ side. It matters, but it isn’t enough if the jobs market isn’t letting them in. In his words, “the demand side matters as much as the supply side”. 

And this door has been closing:

  • Entry-level jobs are scarcer and many ask for way more experience than an 18-year-old can acquire.
  • Recruitment has moved online and been automated. A young person can be screened by a portal, a test or a recorded video interview before anyone has met them. (The conversations we’ve had with young people about this process are too depressing for words.) 
  • Apprenticeship starts for young people have fallen by more than 40%, according to Milburn’s review.
  • When an employer is nervous about the risk, jobs tend to go to older workers with a track record.

Milburn’s conclusion is that Britain has no real system for getting young people from education into work. That’s what I mean by systemic.

Why are young people less confident speaking up?

Nobody is born confident. You get there by doing things, usually badly at first, in places where it’s safe to get them wrong. A lot of those places have gone, or shrunk.

  • Saturday jobs. Milburn points out that part-time work for teenagers had been declining for two decades before the pandemic. That’s where a lot of us first learned to talk to strangers, and to a boss.
  • Youth clubs. His review describes youth clubs, libraries and community centres closing, and youth services being cut. (If you’re interested in what happened to youth clubs, read: ’Up the Youth Club’ by Emma Warren: A hidden history of UK youth clubs.) 
  • Drama. Its share of A-level entries has fallen 58% since 2010, according to the Campaign for the Arts.
  • Speaking in English lessons. Since 2014, the spoken part of GCSE English Language hasn’t counted towards the final grade.
  • Work experience. In some places, Milburn was told, it now depends on who your parents know.
  • Face-to-face time. The pandemic took it away at exactly the age when you learn about interacting and engaging with people.

So it’s no surprise that when the National Literacy Trust surveyed more than 105,000 UK 8 to 18-year-olds in 2025, only four in ten felt good at speaking in front of an audience. Or that in the Institute of Student Employers’ 2025 survey, 42% of employers said school and college leavers fell short on verbal communication, up from 22% two years earlier.

It becomes a loop. Speaking up makes you anxious, so you avoid it. You avoid it, so you never get the practice. Without the practice, the next time is even harder. 

Do this: build young people’s confidence and skills

None of that means we should just wait for the system to fix itself. Young people need chances to practise now, and that’s something we can all get on with.

Young people say so themselves – and not just to us. In Milburn’s survey, 64% said skills like speaking would make a real difference when applying for jobs. And the oracy charity Voice 21 found that teaching speaking skills directly builds confidence.

We see it in our own work:

  • At our holiday drama club in East Sussex, which we run with Dragon Drama, young people come back year after year. We’ve watched huge changes in their confidence, in how they work together and in how they speak up for themselves. (It’s joyous!)
  • At Wakehurst, we’ve spent the last three summers helping work experience students turn their week into a podcast. One student, Swasti, told us she started the week nervous and finished it feeling a lot more confident talking to people.
  • In our media training workshops, charities’ youth ambassadors rehearse live interviews until the nerves stop getting in the way. We’ve written more about media training for youth ambassadors.

What these have in common is simple: real tasks, a safe space, and adults who take young people seriously.

Do this too: what employers, schools and funders need to change

I don’t want to pretend a workshop fixes a jobs market. If we only ever work on young people, we’re telling them the problem is them. It isn’t. Here’s what else needs to happen.

Young people in their boat built from sticks at the Make (Good) Trouble and Dragon Drama Holiday Club in Friston Forest, East Sussex

Young people at Make (Good) Trouble’s drama club using creativity and teamwork skills to make a boat from sticks in the forest

If you’re an employer:

  • Reply to applicants. Young people told Milburn that silence is worse than rejection, because a rejection at least gives you something to work with. 
  • Look again at any ‘entry-level’ job that asks for experience. 
  • Put a human being somewhere in your recruitment process.
  • Offer work experience with real tasks in it, and open it up to young people whose parents don’t have contacts.

If you run a school, or set the rules for schools:

  • Make room for speaking, drama and the arts. They’re where a lot of young people learn to be heard.
  • Treat work experience and careers guidance as core, not an afterthought.

Do you hold the purse strings?

  • Fund the places where young people get to practise being themselves: youth clubs, holiday clubs, community spaces.

And all of us:

  • Change the story we tell. Milburn rejects the caricature of a generation that isn’t interested in work, and so do we.

His final recommendations are due later in 2026. We’ll be watching for them.

Young people are our future

This stuff keeps me awake at night. And puts fire in our bellies to try and make a difference to the system. Milburn ends his foreword by saying that young people haven’t given up on work, so we mustn’t give up on them. We couldn’t agree more.

The young people we meet are full of potential, energy, ideas. They are our future. Let’s invest in them, by building their confidence and skills, and by fixing what’s stacked against them.

If you’d like to help us get this message out there (you could start by sharing this post!) or talk about workshops for the young people you work with, we’d love to hear from you, so please get in touch.

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Here comes a news story that touches your cause, followed, with a few hours’ notice, by a media request. If your youth ambassadors are ready to comment, your charity gets heard, and so do they. If they aren’t, the moment goes to someone else.

We’ve been getting more charities asking us to run media training for their youth ambassadors, so I thought it would be a good time to write about what we do and why it’s worth doing.

What is youth ambassador media training?

Make (Good) Trouble’s media training is a hands-on workshop that prepares charities’ youth ambassadors for press, broadcast and social media interviews. Workshops run from a single two-hour session to a series, for groups of up to 15 young people, and we deliver them across England. So far, we’ve worked with ambassadors aged 14 to 25.

Why do young people find media interviews hard?

Your ambassadors have something important to say, and often something personal. That doesn’t make it easy to say it to a journalist, on camera, with no second take.

It isn’t easy for most young people. When the National Literacy Trust surveyed more than 105,000 UK 8 to 18-year-olds in 2025, only four in ten said they felt good at speaking in front of an audience. Employers see it too. In the Institute of Student Employers’ 2025 survey, 42% said school and college leavers fell short on verbal communication, up from 22% just two years earlier.

That’s not a failing in young people. They’ve had fewer chances to practise. This is a generation that grew up messaging more than calling, lost face-to-face time to the pandemic, and went through schools where the opportunity to do drama and spoken English have been declining. (See also the National Literacy Trust’s report, Children. and Young People’s Speaking and Listening in 2025.)

And it turns into a loop:

  1. Speaking up makes you anxious, so you avoid it.
  2. Because you avoid it, you never get the practice.
  3. Without the practice, the next time feels even harder.

Practice is what breaks the loop. Make (Good) Trouble’s media training gives youth ambassadors that practice, somewhere safe, with people on their side.

What do youth ambassadors learn in media training?

Make (Good) Trouble’s media training workshops are hands-on from start to finish. Over a session, youth ambassadors will:

  • Work out what they want to say. They start with your campaign, and their story, and frame how they want to talk about it.
  • Learn how interviews work. The different types, how to listen, what body language says, and how to ask good questions as well as answer them.
  • Try every role. If numbers and time allow, everyone takes a turn as producer, interviewer and interviewee, using professional audio kit or speaking in front of the group.
  • Practise under pressure. ‘As live’ interviews with no retakes, so they learn to keep going after a stumble.
  • Find their voice. Coaching on how to shape their stories, keeping a focus on what they want to say, and ways to handle nerves and the unexpected.
  • Take it with them. We finish by looking back at what they’ve learned, with follow-up guidance that can include CV support.

These are skills for life as much as for media. A young person who learns to handle a live interview at 17 takes that into every job interview that follows.

Make (Good) Trouble's workshop wall at Ben Kinsella Trust with post-its showing participant's goals for media training workshop including 'clarity', 'stage fright' and 'speaking under pressure'.
Young people come armed with questions, so we always start by capturing them on big Post-it notes. By the end of the workshop we go through them and make sure every query is answered.

What does your charity get out of it?

  • You can say yes. Media requests rarely come with much notice. If your ambassadors have already practised, you can take the opportunity when it arrives.
  • Your message lands. Ambassadors who know what the campaign is trying to achieve can put it across in their own words, which is what makes people listen.
  • They get their point across, whatever the question. Interviewers don’t always ask about the thing your ambassadors came to say. It’s a question we hear a lot from the young people we’ve worked with, and we help them make their point anyway.
  • You’ve looked after them. Putting a young person in front of a journalist unprepared isn’t fair on them. Our workshop students have already rehearsed what to do when a question throws them.
  • They can front your own content too. The same skills work for your social media, films and events.
  • You give something back. Your ambassadors give you their time and their stories. This sends them away with skills and confidence they’ll use long after the campaign.

How does the training work, and who runs it?

We shape every workshop around your campaign and your young people. Sessions can cover interview techniques, public speaking, fronting social media content and more.

We’ve delivered media and interview training for youth ambassadors at the Ben Kinsella Trust, for work experience students at Wakehurst, and for students at The Horsfall, part of the 42nd Street charity. As the Ben Kinsella Trust put it, their ambassadors “gained valuable knowledge and skills to support their future careers”.

Workshops are led by our co-founders, Daisy Cresswell and me. We bring years of media, journalism and public speaking experience. All our team hold advanced DBS certificates.

Youth ambassador media training: FAQs

How long is a media training workshop?

Anything from a single two-hour session to a series of workshops. We shape the length and content around your campaign and your young people.

What age group is it for?

Make (Good) Trouble has run media training for young people aged 14 to 25, and we can be flexible.

How many young people can take part?

Up to 15 in each workshop.

Where do you run workshops?

We deliver media training across England. So far we’ve run workshops in Sussex and Manchester, with Birmingham coming up.

How much does it cost?

The cost of a Make (Good) Trouble media training workshop depends on what you need: the length of the session, how much preparation is involved, the materials, and how many young people are taking part. The easiest thing is to get in touch and tell us what you have in mind. We’ll talk it through with you and give you a price.

Do youth ambassadors need any media experience?

No. We start with the basics of how interviews work and how to use the equipment, so nobody needs to have done this before.

What if an interviewer doesn’t ask about the thing they want to say?

This is one of the questions we hear most from the ambassadors we’ve worked with. Our training helps young people get their point across even when the question isn’t the one they were hoping for.

How do you look after young people who are sharing personal stories?

Make (Good) Trouble’s workshops are run as a safe, supportive space, with emotional support alongside the practical training. We carry out a risk assessment for every workshop, and we ask you to share any access or support needs in advance so we can plan the session around them. It often helps if a trusted adult from your organisation attends – one the young people already know, so they feel at home. All our team hold advanced DBS certificates.

If you’d like your youth ambassadors ready before the next media request arrives, get in touch. We’d love to hear what they need.