Nottingham University Samworth Academy — A Personal Development book built around Voice 21 oracy

The brief

Nottingham University Samworth Academy approached us to design a Personal Development book that would sit on every student’s desk for the whole year — one place to anchor termly reflection and a permanent reference for oracy in tutor time.

NUSA had rolled out the Voice 21 oracy approach across the school. Their senior team wanted a printed companion that put the talk-tactics framework into students’ hands at the start of the year, rather than leaving it as a poster on a wall.

What we designed

Working with NUSA’s PD lead and pastoral team, we shaped a slim 16-page book that follows the rhythm of the school year.

• A cover that locks the student’s name, teacher and tutor group into the white panel at the top, sat over an academy-pink background with NUSA’s tree logo on the left.
• The Voice 21 Student Talk Tactics — Instigate, Probe, Challenge, Clarify, Summarise, Build — laid out as a single reference spread with the sentence stems students can pick from in discussion.
• 54 open “Reflect” pages for unprompted student notes.
• Six dated half-term sections — Autumn 1 through Summer 2 — so reflection lines up exactly with the UK academic calendar.

The finished book

900 copies shipped ahead of the autumn term — one for every student on roll. NUSA hands the book out as part of their start-of-year tutor pack, and the Voice 21 framework now lives in students’ bags instead of on the back of a classroom door.