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Eve is one of the Co-Founders of Be Her Lead, and runs the programme with girls in Year 7 and 8 at start-up school Bolder Academy, in Isleworth. She is currently Lead Practitioner for Literacy at Bolder, having previously worked as Literacy Coordinator at Villiers High School, Southall. Eve also runs our Instagram account and is working on a project to create a journal for Be Her Lead girls.

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Introduction

“70.5% of girls agreed that good speaking and listening skills will give them the confidence to pursue their aspirations, compared with just 63.0% of boys.”
— from the National Literacy Trust's 'Aspirations, literacy and gender' report

Literacy, and oracy in particular, is a huge determiner of academic, social and aspirational success. In March 2020 the National Literacy Trust published a report on ‘Aspirations, literacy and gender’, surveying over 2000 students and adults looking at girls and women in particular, and how they differ from boys and men in terms of their aspirations and perceived role of literacy in achieving them: “70.5% of girls agreed that good speaking and listening skills will give them the confidence to pursue their aspirations, compared with just 63.0% of boys.”

This report completely echoes my views of how important it is that we connect our promotion of powerful and inclusive oracy in the classroom, and make students realise that our voices are the key to creating a more gender-inclusive environment where all of our students can articulate themselves in a confident way, feeling a sense of belonging amongst their peers and with their teachers. Language connects us all and our voices are the most powerful tool in creating an inclusive environment. We not only need to ensure that our schools have a robust set of oracy expectations for students but also for teachers. I believe that if literacy and oracy are such a huge determiner of aspirations, then we constantly need to address how we speak to our students and how they speak back to us. These little slip ups that we make and non-inclusive informalities such as ‘guys’ are not transforming us into powerful teachers of oracy.

As a teacher I truly think that our voices are more important than ever and we need to use them in a powerful, inclusive and transformative way that our students can learn from and follow in our footsteps. Powerful oracy should be at the forefront of creating gender equality and inclusivity in the classroom. If language and oracy determines a students' social outcomes then they need to hear it from the ‘experts’ of talk - the teachers! As female role models we must keep our minds open to it and if we hear it then we need to do something about it.

Learning from our students

Some of Eve’s students at the Be Her Lead Programme Launch in February, where they performed a collaborative poem.

Some of Eve’s students at the Be Her Lead Programme Launch in February, where they performed a collaborative poem.

My main reason for preaching the need to create a gender inclusive classroom is in fact coming from my very own students! Young people are certainly more aware of how we divide our classes into gender - “Miss you always pick on the girls first”, “Miss the groups need to be equal boys and girls”, “Miss why can’t we have a mixed ping pong table - not just a boys one”, “but Miss I am strong too, why did you not ask me to move the tables?”

If we are giving young girls a more powerful voice, teaching them to promote gender equality through programmes like Be Her Lead, then we need to act on what we are preaching to the girls! Author Chimanda Ngoze Adichi perfectly describes issues with gender in We Should All Be Feminists: “The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognising how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn’t have the weight of gender expectations.” In other words we need to work towards being free of gender expectations; hence why one place to start all of this is by removing any expectations of gender in the classroom. At Be Her Lead we want female teachers to become better role models to the girls that they teach and we need to model and echo the vocabulary of powerful and influential women in our public speaking workshops. We also need to remember that some of the girls that we work with may not want to be called ‘girls’ and that actually it is important we create a gender inclusive classroom where how we address our students is not defined by gender. 

As a lead practitioner for Literacy across the curriculum it is also my job to encourage teachers to develop their oracy skills and in turn passing this onto their students. Getting girls to ‘use their voice’ and ‘be heard’ is also a huge part of Be Her Lead. We need to model positive, empowering, gender neutral, academic language of equality if we want to close barriers that girls have in the classroom - one of them simply being that they are too afraid to speak up. At Be Her Lead we have created workshops for teachers where girls can learn about public speaking and at our Be Her Lead conference we had young girls speak in front of large audiences for the first time. Our programme has also helped girls to use their voices confidently and a lot of our feedback from girls relates to how confident they become in being able to use their voices more. Getting girls to speak in front of their peers and other girls is a hugely powerful tool and we will continue to promote this as part of the Be Her Lead programme.

“At Be Her Lead we have created workshops for teachers where girls can learn about public speaking and at our Be Her Lead conference we had young girls speak in front of large audiences for the first time”

Be Her Lead’s impact on girls’ confidence and oracy

Student participants from our pilot programme said:

 “The programme has helped me socialise more and I no longer feel scared to make mistakes. For example, in class when I think I know the answer to a question, I attempt it rather being scared that I might get it wrong.”

“It has helped my boost my confidence like not being afraid to put my hand up in class or to speak to new people.”

“It's made me feel a little more confident knowing that there other girls who feel the same as me, which is amazing because I've always just been anxious my whole life and to now feel even the slightest bit confident is mind-blowing.”

Find out more and register interest for the Be Her Lead autumn programme here.

Useful resources

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