A couple of years ago, I got a call from the formidable Natasha Porter, a former teacher who trains and develops prison officers at Unlocked Graduates.
She wanted to know why prisoners, and particularly young offenders, didn’t have access to Oak National Academy’s online classroom. She was right to give me a hard time - why couldn’t young offenders and prisoners benefit, too?
As I end my time as CEO of Oak, I am chuffed that we’ve been able to respond to Natasha’s challenge and our resources are now rolling out across both the youth and adult prison estate.
We have been working with the Ministry of Justice digital team to share our lesson resources on its Launchpad platform, which is used by about 13,000 prisoners on secure devices in their cells.
We hope that our content will provide a boost to their education. We know it’s crucial for supporting rehabilitation and we’re proud to play a small role in that work.
Making Oak better
It feels like quite a leap from the early days of Oak, created as the pandemic hit the UK.
Shortly after we launched, the platform and our first few batches of lessons went live. My friend and Oak’s co-founder, David Thomas, wrote an excellent article setting out what was wrong with Oak National Academy.
That blog set an important cultural tone within our little organisation, one where we tried our best to always focus on making Oak better and more helpful for its users.
There is still a lot wrong with Oak National Academy - and we welcome the scrutiny we have received - but there are a lot of things my remarkable team have got right, and it feels fitting to round off a rollercoaster five years by noting a few of them.
The pandemic boom
In those early days, we - and by “we”, I mean a national partnership - knocked up a national online school in nine days during a lockdown.
Within the first term, pupils had taken part in 20 million lessons. We enriched this online school with clubs and assemblies from archbishops, prime ministers, and .
As the pandemic continued, headteachers told us that instead of making 200 lessons each week, we needed 10,000 lessons up front - so that was our summer holiday and our teacher hub was born.
We knew that children from low-income families were struggling to pay the data charges to access our lessons, so we went to bat with the telecoms companies to make access free for all.
In our busiest pandemic week, 2.5 million pupils were doing their lessons with Oak. By the end of the pandemic, pupils had taken part in about 160 million lessons.
Post-Covid developments
As the pandemic subsided, we transferred the organisation from a charity working with the government into direct public ownership with a specific goal to reduce teacher workload and improve curriculum expertise.
We loved our pandemic resources, but we knew that they could be even better, so we set about remaking them. Through our work with 20 excellent schools, school trusts, subject associations, publishers and universities, in a few months’ time, we will have built the world’s first free, high-quality, fully resourced, open source curriculum.
When Putin invaded Ukraine, we set up a translation function on our lesson subtitles to help schools supporting refugees. Alongside this, we upgraded the whole platform and turbocharged it with the UK government’s first public-facing artificial intelligence (AI) tool - Aila.
We’re now just shy of 50 per cent of teachers in England using our materials each term (around 200,000). And usage continues to grow. It’s up over 200 per cent year on year.
Our independent evaluation shows that those teachers’ workload is down (up to 5 hours per week), their curriculum expertise is up, they are happier and say that they are more likely to stay in teaching.
More to do on curriculum and AI
So a lot done, but a lot to do.
There is more to do to support teachers and help them manage their workload. More to do on curriculum expertise, which is growing but still unevenly spread across the system. More to do to stay at the cutting edge of AI in education.
I know that John Roberts, Oak’s new interim CEO, and the team will keep getting a few more things right across these areas as he takes over from me.
I wish the team and the wider partnership the best of luck as they continue to tackle these challenges and thank them and all of the people who have used Oak and helped out on this rollercoaster ride.
Matt Hood is CEO of Oak National Academy
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