Communication Skills for Kids: How Samad Shoeb Built Oratrics to Close India's Gap
Most Indian classrooms are built to teach subjects, not to teach children how to speak. A student can top every exam and still freeze the moment they’re asked to introduce themselves in front of a room. This is the gap Samad Shoeb noticed early on and it’s the reason he built Oratrics, an EdTech platform focused on communication skills for kids, from the ground up.
Samad Shoeb didn’t start with a business plan. He started with a simple observation: children in India are taught to memorize answers, but rarely taught how to express an idea, hold a conversation, or speak with confidence in front of others. That gap doesn’t just affect school life. It follows children into college interviews, first jobs, and every room they’ll ever need to speak up in.
This article looks at how that observation turned into a company, what the communication skills gap in India actually looks like on the ground, and how parents can start closing it at home even before enrolling a child in any program.
The Communication Skills Gap in India: Why It Exists
India’s education system has historically rewarded the right answer, not the ability to explain it. Textbooks are dense, exams are written, and marks are the primary measure of success. Speaking, listening, and expressing thoughts clearly are treated as “extra,” not essential.
A few reasons this gap has persisted for years:
- Large classrooms, limited individual attention. Teachers with 40-plus students rarely have time to give each child a chance to speak, be corrected, and try again.
- Fear of judgment. Children who mispronounce a word or hesitate mid-sentence are often laughed at by classmates, which teaches them silence is safer than speaking up.
- No structured curriculum for it. Math has a syllabus. Communication doesn’t. Most schools treat it as something a child will “pick up” naturally, which isn’t true for every child.
- Parents don’t always know where to start. Many parents recognize their child is shy or hesitant to speak but don’t have a clear, structured way to help beyond telling them to “be more confident.”
Samad Shoeb saw this pattern repeat across cities, income levels, and school types. The gap wasn’t isolated to one kind of family, it was systemic.
How Samad Shoeb Built Oratrics Around This Problem
Rather than building another academic tutoring platform, Samad Shoeb focused Oratrics on the skills schools weren’t teaching: public speaking, personality development, and confident communication, taught in a structured way from as early as Class 1.
The approach behind Oratrics rests on a few core ideas Samad Shoeb has repeated consistently:
- Start early, not late. Confidence and communication habits form young. Waiting until college or a job interview to “fix” a child’s hesitation is far harder than building the habit at age 7 or 8.
- Make it structured, not occasional. A one-off elocution competition doesn’t build a skill. Oratrics was designed around consistent, progressive sessions similar to how a child learns an instrument or a sport, through repetition and gradual difficulty.
- Treat it as a life skill, not a hobby. Oratrics frames communication, confidence, and personality development as skills that affect every part of a child’s future, not an extracurricular add-on.
- Build for scale without losing quality. As Oratrics grew to reach students across 22+ countries, the challenge became keeping the same structured teaching quality regardless of where a student logs in from.
This is also why Oratrics eventually expanded beyond just public speaking into personality development, creative writing, and financial literacy because communication struggles are rarely isolated. A child who’s hesitant to speak is often also hesitant to write, ask questions, or handle money conversations confidently.
How to Improve Communication Skills in Children: What Actually Works
Parents don’t need to wait for a formal program to start helping a child build these skills. Based on the approach Oratrics uses in its own sessions, here are practices that genuinely help:
- Give them the floor at home. Let your child explain their school day, a game, or a story in full sentences without interrupting or correcting them mid-thought. Save feedback for after they finish.
- Ask open questions, not yes/no ones. Instead of “Did you have a good day?” try “What was the most interesting thing that happened today?” This forces a fuller answer, not a one-word reply.
- Normalize mistakes out loud. If a child mispronounces a word or loses their train of thought, respond calmly. Children copy how adults react to their errors.
- Read aloud together. Reading out loud not just silently builds vocabulary, pacing, and comfort with using their own voice.
- Create small, low-stakes speaking moments. Asking a child to describe a movie to a grandparent or explain a recipe to a sibling builds the same muscle as formal public speaking, without the pressure.
- Be patient with pace, not just content. Confidence builds slower than vocabulary. A child might know the right words long before they’re comfortable saying them out loud to a group.
These are the same principles Oratrics builds on in its structured public speaking and personality development sessions, just formalized, practiced consistently, and guided by trained instructors instead of left to chance.
Why This Matters Beyond the Classroom
The communication skills gap in India doesn’t disappear after school. It shows up in college placement interviews, first-job presentations, client meetings, and everyday situations where a person needs to advocate for themselves clearly. Samad Shoeb has often pointed out that the students who go furthest aren’t always the ones with the highest marks they’re the ones who can explain what they know, ask for what they need, and hold a room’s attention when it matters.
That’s the gap Oratrics set out to close, one classroom and one child at a time.
FAQs
Large class sizes, an exam-focused curriculum, and fear of judgment from peers mean most schools don’t give children structured practice in speaking and expressing ideas confidently.
Consistent, low-pressure speaking practice at home and through structured programs works better than occasional events like school competitions. Starting young and normalizing mistakes builds confidence faster than waiting until a child is older.
Samad Shoeb is the co-founder and CEO of Oratrics, an EdTech platform focused on communication skills, personality development, and confidence building for children and working professionals across 22+ countries.
Oratrics’ programs typically start as early as Class 1, on the principle that communication habits are easier to build young than to correct later.