Download Booklet 1: What is Real? Here (Log in using your username and password). We follow one question from a four-year-old spotting a shark on a discovery table to a fourteen-year-old debating deepfake responsibility. In KS1, children learn to question what they see. By KS2, they are spotting manipulation. At KS3: not just can I spot a fake, but what should we do about it?
School is a place where people and ideas meet. It’s a safe space to explore difference, and where young people can come to discuss the world around them. That world is increasingly digital, distancing children from meaningful human connections. The inclusion of oracy and artificial intelligence (AI) in the 2025 Curriculum and Assessment Review (CAR) was a deliberate act, one that has created a ‘moment’ in time.
This opens the dialogue around what oracy and AI can do for education. At first glance, you might think this is a curious mix, but taken together, these apparently separate fields offer us an array of ‘teachable moments’ on advocacy, agency, and adopting a critical stance in an AI-mediated world. This is why I floated the idea of an AI through Oracy series as a collaboration between Voice 21 and STEM Learning. Children don't just need to understand AI. They need to know where they stand on it. Bringing this moment to life through talk will teach them to build their own stories and opinions about this technology. Oracy is the vehicle for this; it gives children the language and confidence to form, test, and own their views. This is where you come in, the teacher. Your role in this is to create the conditions for speaking and listening so AI and oracy have space to breathe in the curriculum.
The importance of oracy in the AI debate
At the Voice 21 Speaking Summit last month, language was spoken about as the embodiment of thought. The Oracy Framework, developed by Voice 21 and Oracy Cambridge, gives teachers a way to define speaking, listening and communication skills across physical, linguistic, cognitive, and social-emotional strands. By contrast, AI has been on its own linguistic journey, one shaped by large language models (LLMs). Where oracy developed through human relationship and pedagogy, AI developed through pattern, prediction, and scale and yet both now sit in the same classroom, asking the same fundamental question: what does it mean to communicate? This is why AI needs to be talked about, and why oracy as a medium to share ideas matters.
Some teachers would rather turn down the volume on AI, but it would be irresponsible of us to pass over it in silence. If we are alive to the possibilities of what AI can offer our students, then we open the door to dialogue. But when it comes to AI, it is more than speaking or being heard; it’s about listening to what students think and speak. Listening, then, is an ‘orientation’ or a way of positioning the talk so it matters. What this series of booklets attempts to do is empower teachers to speak to children about AI. If we can achieve that, oracy gives children the language to recognise the inequalities AI can quietly embed and the confidence to push back. Whether this ‘pushing back’ is in relation to deep fakes or AI’s impact on the planet, allowing students to be active in the debate by taking a stance builds agency. The ideas and activities in this pack have been designed with the child in mind, with provocations, probing questions and the surfacing of the language that surrounds AI. If oracy is the embodiment of thought, then these activities are where that thinking begins.
How to approach this series of booklets
This three-booklet series provides teachers with structured, progressive lessons designed for a range of teaching moments that work as standalone activities or integrate into the wider digital curriculum. Each booklet can be taught within PSHE, tutor times, or other appropriate moments and returns to one essential question with increasing sophistication across key stages. Teachers receive explicit learning objectives and vocabulary definitions to help navigate the content. The booklets have been written with age and stage in mind. There are three distinct access points to the content: EYFS & Key Stage 1, Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 3, covering learning to talk to learning through talk.
Booklet 1: What is Real? Download now. We follow one question from a four-year-old spotting a shark on a discovery table to a fourteen-year-old debating deepfake responsibility. In KS1, children learn to question what they see. By KS2, they are spotting manipulation. At KS3: not just can I spot a fake, but what should we do about it?
Booklet 2: Can We Trust It? We discuss cartoons, talk tactics, and debates to establish that truth is rarely straightforward and trust must be earned. In KS1, a story told two ways starts the conversation. By KS3, the question is systemic: who controls the information, and what happens when trust breaks down at scale?
Booklet 3: What is the Impact of AI on the Planet? The final booklet explores land, water, energy, and minerals. In KS1, children learn that devices are made, powered, and discarded. By KS3, the question becomes why and who, examining why environmental costs fall unevenly across the supply chain.
Together, oracy and AI offer education something it has always needed but rarely had a clear language for: a way to help young people make sense of the world they are actually living in. These booklets are not a curriculum solution or a policy response; they are an invitation. An invitation for teachers to create the conditions where children can think out loud about technology that is already shaping their lives, form opinions that are genuinely their own, and develop the confidence to voice them. That invitation extends across the curriculum.
The questions these activities raise don't belong to a single subject; they touch the boundaries of many. Like literacy, oracy is often left to English teachers - despite being essential across subject domains. Conversely, AI tends to sit within Computer Science, which isolates it from other subjects. In truth, the issues within these booklets sit at the intersection of science and society, of data and democracy. When students explore the environmental cost of AI, they are doing geography and ethics. When they interrogate a deepfake or trace the origins of a viral claim, they are practising the same critical scrutiny that underpins good science, responsible citizenship, and media literacy, threads that run through the 2025 CAR. I would argue that teaching AI through talk is not an abstract concept, but the connective tissue of a cohesive curriculum, one that prepares children for an uncertain future. Teachers across STEM, humanities, and beyond will find natural entry points here, and that cross-curricular dialogue is part of the point.
If we get this right, the young people who move through these experiences will leave with more than just an understanding of AI. They will carry a habit of mind to question, to challenge, and to think critically about the systems around them. That matters because the future won't just happen to them; they will shape it. And perhaps more importantly, they will begin to understand their place within it, not as passive users of technology, but as active, informed, and thoughtful participants in a world they have every right to interrogate.
I hope you enjoy the activities.
Written by
AI Consultant | School Leader | Researcher | Teacher