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As the Government announces plans to make spoken communication a core part of education, My-Thesis asks why these essential skills should stop being assessed when students reach university.

For generations, education has been built around three fundamental skills: reading, writing and arithmetic. Yet one of the most important abilities for success in life has often been overlooked — the capacity to communicate our ideas clearly and confidently through speech.

That may finally be changing.

On 15 October 2026, Education Secretary Lucy Powell announced plans to give oracy — the ability to express ourselves effectively through speaking and listening — equal status with reading and writing in England's national curriculum.

We are delighted to announce a new partnership between My-Thesis and the Irish Universities Association (IUA), the representative voice of Ireland’s research-intensive public universities.

The IUA represents seven universities — Dublin City University, Maynooth University, Trinity College Dublin, University College Cork, University College Dublin, University of Galway and University of Limerick — and works collectively across higher education policy, research, researcher development, engagement and internationalisation.

We are delighted to announce an official partnership between My-Thesis and the Canadian Association for Graduate Studies (CAGS) — Association canadienne pour les études supérieures.

CAGS is Canada’s national organisation providing leadership, fostering community, and promoting collaboration to advance excellence in graduate education, research, and scholarship. Since its foundation in 1962, CAGS has become a leading voice for graduate education in Canada, bringing together universities and research institutions from across the country.

Employers have long said that communication matters. New evidence suggests something slightly more important: they increasingly want graduates to prove that they can communicate, rather than simply claim that they can.

One of the reasons for this platform is to not only provide an authentic voice on new cutting-edge research, but also showcase presentation skills which will become a premium in the changing graduate world. But orally presenting your research to an audience is also a valuable learning experience. A new case study from Swansea University suggests that 3MT is more than a public speaking exercise. It can produce measurable changes in how postgraduate researchers understand, present and value their own work.

Artificial intelligence is changing higher education at a remarkable pace.

In a recent opinion piece for Times Higher Education, Bruce Hood argued that as AI becomes increasingly capable of producing polished written work, universities must rethink how they develop and assess one of the most important graduate attributes: the ability to communicate knowledge effectively to other human beings.

We are delighted to announce that My-Thesis has been added to the official external resources page of the University of Queensland's Three Minute Thesis (3MT®) programme, the global organisation that created and oversees the world's most influential research communication competition.

For a platform that only launched a few months ago, this represents a significant milestone.

For many around the world, the historic voyage of Artemis II around the moon and back again has been a welcomed distraction during these troubling times. 

The spacecraft's re-entry into Earth's atmosphere was not a gentle descent, but something closer to controlled violence. The vehicle streaked across the sky wrapped in a sheath of glowing plasma, briefly resembling a meteor.