How do you set the agenda in an English meeting?
With one sentence for the number of items ("There are three items on the agenda today"), one way in ("Let's start with item one"), and fixed phrases for switching and handing over ("Moving on to item three," "I'll hand over to Anna").
- Number the entries with "item": "item one," "the first item on the agenda" — "point" belongs in the discussion.
- "Discuss" takes a direct object: "discuss the budget," but "talk about the budget."
- Switching and parking: "Moving on to item three" and "Can we park that for now?"
B1 · Meetings · 10 minSetting and steering an agenda in English, taught brick by brick.
A structured ten-slide lesson for B1 learners. Hear a natural agenda announcement in context, meet the three groups of phrases — announce, move on, park — from a tutor, then practise them across six interactive drills before a final six-question quiz. The whole arc is under ten minutes and nothing requires a signup.
- CEFR levelB1 · Intermediate
- Time to completeAbout 10 minutes
- SkillsSpeaking, Vocabulary, Listening, Writing
- Bricks10 blocks
01 / 06
Why the agenda is the steering wheel
In an English meeting the agenda is more than a list — it is the steering wheel. The person who says how many items there are and in what order they come decides what the room talks about for the next hour. That is exactly why the agenda phrases are worth knowing by heart. They are short, they repeat in every meeting, and they work regardless of the subject — a budget review, a project status, a hiring decision, quarterly planning, a supplier call. At B1 level, nothing here has to be invented. You need three groups of phrases: one to announce the agenda, one to move from item to item and hand over to colleagues in between, and one to park side topics and close an item cleanly. This lesson hands you all three groups as ready-made bricks. Once they are automatic, your chairing sounds calm and orderly in English, even when the discussion itself still costs you real effort.
02 / 06
Announcing the agenda: give the number, name item one
Announcing the agenda is two moves: you give the number of items, and you name the first one. Two sentences cover the number. "There are three items on the agenda today" is the neutral, slightly more formal option and suits clients and senior management. "We have three points to get through" is looser and stresses that there is a workload ahead — ideal inside your own team. If you sent the agenda round beforehand, you say "I've circulated the agenda." The verb "to circulate" here means sending it to everyone involved in advance, not passing paper around the room. Then you name the way in: "Item one is the budget," or "Item one is the project status." Watch the word order: the number follows the noun — item one, item two, item three. In a quarterly meeting the full announcement sounds like this: "I've circulated the agenda. There are three items today, and item one is the budget." Three short sentences, and everyone knows the route.
03 / 06
Moving through the items: allocating time and handing over
Once the agenda is set, you need phrases for the traffic between the items. The way in is simply "Let's start with item one." If you want to put a limit on the entry, you say "Let's allow ten minutes for this" or "Let's give this ten minutes." Both are entirely standard in meetings and read as helpful rather than strict. For handing over to a colleague there are two equivalent patterns: "I'll hand over to Anna for the second item" performs the handover directly, while "Anna will take us through the second item" announces it. Both are polite, short, and pass the floor clearly — with a name, so nobody has to guess whose turn it is. To move to the next entry you use "Moving on to item three," or the fuller "Let's move on to item three." The short participle form is enough; in meetings it is in fact the more common one. When the list is done, "Any other business?" opens the floor to anything that was not listed as its own item. On English agendas that final line is often printed simply as AOB.
04 / 06
Parking, taking it offline, and closing an item
Every meeting throws up topics that matter but do not belong to the item you are currently on. Business English has three fixed responses for that. "Can we park that for now?" sets the topic aside without devaluing it: to park here means to keep, not to discard. The contribution is not bad, it is simply not due yet. "Let's take that offline" means two or three people will settle the matter after the meeting; it has nothing to do with an internet connection, not even on a video call. And "Shall we come back to that at the end?" explicitly defers the point to the close of the session, usually under "Any other business?" Finally, to close an item you need a sentence that records the agreement and moves the meeting on in the same breath: "Are we agreed on that? Good, let's move on." That combination of a short check-back and an immediate step forward is the most polite way to end a discussion without cutting anyone off — and it puts you back on the agenda.
05 / 06
Typical errors from German-speaking learners
Four errors come up again and again in this area. First, the preposition on "discuss": because German says "über etwas diskutieren," the "about" slides into the English — "We discuss about the budget." The correct form is "We discuss the budget," because "discuss" takes its object directly. With "talk," by contrast, you very much do need the preposition: "We talk about the budget." Second, the word for an agenda entry. German "Punkt" pulls learners toward "point," but the numbered entry is an "item": "item one," "the first item on the agenda." In discussion "point" is perfectly correct — "that's a good point" — just not as a number on the list. Third, "Wir machen weiter mit Punkt drei," which often becomes "We make further with point three"; in English it is "Let's move on to item three." And fourth, time: "Wir nehmen uns zehn Minuten" is not "We take ten minutes" but "Let's allow ten minutes for this" or "Let's give this ten minutes." All four are transfers from German, and all four vanish once you learn the English formula as a whole unit.
06 / 06
Pronunciation and register: saying "agenda" properly
One single word gives German-speaking speakers away here: "agenda." In English the first vowel is an unstressed schwa, the g is soft like the j in "jam," and the stress falls on the second syllable: /əˈdʒendə/ — a-GEN-da. Practise it not in isolation but inside the whole phrase "the first item on the agenda," where "on the" collapses into one unstressed unit and the word almost automatically sounds more natural. Grammatically, "agenda" behaves like an ordinary singular noun in English: "the agenda is quite full today," and the plural is "agendas." On register, the same rule of thumb applies as when opening a meeting: inside your own team the short forms are enough — "Three items today. Let's start with the budget." In front of clients or senior management you take the longer ones — "There are three items on the agenda today, and I'd like to start with the budget." Either way, English stays plainer than most learners expect.