Tim Sanders Warwick Mansell

The creeping growth of Oak’s curriculum

Warwick Mansell is a freelance education journalist and founder/writer of educationuncovered. co.uk

WILL it be a help to hard-pressed schools and their teachers – of particular use where there are shortages of expert professionals – and an aid to cutting staff workload?

Or is it a dangerous example of Government overreach: an attempt by an ideologically minded Department for Education (DfE) to get right into the detail of teaching, which has damaging implications in terms of its potential to deprofessionalise classrooms?

This is the debate at the heart of the extraordinary rise of Oak National Academy.

Established quickly in 2020 after Covid hit, by teachers with strong representation from the multi-academy trust sector and subject to emergency Government funding, Oak won plaudits for being a useful free online learning platform.

But the organisation has now morphed into something much bigger, having been relaunched as a Government quango this autumn with £43 million of funding over three years and seemingly a main brief now as a curriculum body.

Surveying materials put out by Oak, I am not alone in being staggered by its scope. The DfE has stated that Oak will: “Offer full curriculum packages consisting of curriculum maps outlining a curriculum across an academic year, setting out the units of learning, the key learning within each unit, and the sequence of this learning; and full sets of lesson materials for each subject.”

Oak is now proposing the development of thousands of off-the-shelf lessons, to be built by commercially contracted “suppliers”, to be available to schools in 2024.

Perhaps most extraordinary of all is the approach’s proposed rigidity. According to slides produced as part of Oak’s supplier “market engagement”, each lesson will follow the format “quiz; slides; video; worksheet; quiz”, with the slides suggesting this was because this had worked well in Oak’s pandemic incarnation.

Oak says all this will be entirely voluntary – and useful. But concerns have been expressed by experienced staff about offthe-peg lessons not being what they went into the classroom for. Oak has also come up with a set of curriculum principles which seem to have had no consultation, in the context of what seems to be a Government-friendly, arguably conservative-leaning outlook in the organisation’s set-up and philosophy.

NEU joint general secretary Kevin Courtney described the move as a “serious mistake” which would undermine teacher autonomy. Sir Jon Coles, head of England’s largest academy chain, has stated it was “wrong for the Government to develop a preferred lesson-by-lesson curriculum at all”.

Will it succeed? There has been a fair amount of Twitter talk of resistance from professionals. Whatever happens, in my view this is one of the most significant recent developments in education policy to watch.