Oak National Academy is the collective effort of over 300 teachers from England’s state schools to provide nearly 10,000 free lessons for pupils learning at home and in school due to lockdown. Designed, built and launched in two weeks, Oak was a rapid response to support schools’ remote learning.
Started by just 40 teachers with volunteers from a range of education organisations, Oak pre-recorded weekly lessons for children in Reception up to Year 10. Remarkably, Oak delivered two million lessons in its first week. Oak then developed specialist resources and ran weekly assemblies featuring astronauts, gymnasts, dinosaurs and a real life princess, the Duchess of Cambridge. Oak has also worked with the Church of England and the Careers & Enterprise Company to provide a broad range of lessons.
Oak even developed its own Oak Activity Club with free school holiday and extra curricular activities from The Scouts, Jamie’s Farm, Biteback and Votes for Schools among others. After initial Government support, Oak secured further funding to keep its lessons and resources available throughout 2020/21.
Oak’s curriculum plan for next year was released in July to help schools with contingency planning to provide a seamless transition between learning at home and in school, should they face local lockdowns or absences of staff and pupils. Our exceptional group of teachers are now putting together over 10,000 lessons ready for schools to use from September 2020. Our journey has been remarkable, we recently published our End of Term report and findings highlighted:
- Oak has welcomed 4.7 million online visitors
- An average of 220,000 users each day
- Oak created 15 million hours of video material
- Oak delivered just under 20 million lessons
- 19,927,910 lessons have been accessed
- 181 million minutes worth of video lessons have been watched
As a unique resource created by teachers, for teachers, Oak is a testament to the dedication and resilience of the sector.
