National Centre For The Oral Tradition

Our declared purpose is to celebrate and cultivate the essential skills of oracy, by encouraging civil utterance, and folding the oral tradition back into modern lives. In education we are determined to establish oracy as an essential requirement and precursor to literacy; to ensure that all children in the UK receive a grounding in public speaking; and to balance the current gender divide in educational attainment by furthering oracy in boys. In offering artistic performances, we are committed to increasing access to the oral tradition by establishing excellence as a benchmark, raising the profile of neglected arts, and satisfying the public’s increasing hunger for live performance. We are dedicated to legitimizing storytelling as an art-form in its own right (as theatre was legitimised in the early twentieth century). In Public Speaking we seek to improve public discourse by promoting articulacy, civility and authentic delivery in all contexts. In Mytho-poetic work (story and image-based personal development work) we are dedicated to the proposition that story, metaphor and symbol are keys to individual and communal well-being and healing.