When Oak became an arm’s length body, there were concerns from some in the education sector that this would mean a narrowing of the curriculum market.
In fact, the opposite is true: a thriving curriculum market - a range of organisations providing quality, optional resources - is what works best for teachers.
It should never just be Oak and we will ensure Oak expands, not restricts, options.
Variety is important because it means teachers can pick what’s best for their pupils, and this means all the organisations making resources are incentivised to innovate and keep improving.
How we can help innovation
So how will Oak ensure this happens? In our plans, we’re taking deliberate steps to support this flourishing ecosystem.
First, money and expertise matter. We think it’s best that expertise in designing curricula and resources should stay in the sector.
So rather than Oak making all the resources in-house, we’re investing over £8 million to share and develop some of the best thinking and work that is already happening - in schools, subject associations and commercial organisations.
These resources, drawn from the education sector, will always be entirely optional and fully adaptable, because only teachers know what’s best for their pupils - and that might not be Oak.
In fact only a tiny number - 0.3 per cent - use it as their only source of classroom resources.
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Meanwhile, for the teachers that are using Oak, 42 per cent say it saves them time, with an average time saving of three hours a week.
So alongside sharing our main partners’ curriculum sequence, we’ll host and promote high-quality offers from other providers, linking to their sites so that teachers can find out more if they want to.
Sharing expertise: who and where
So far, so simple. Then came some more tricky decisions. Who can use the new content we create?
First and foremost it’s teachers and schools, so that they can develop their curriculum and plan lessons.
But are there other ways in which Oak content could be used to help teachers? In the technical world this is called “licencing”, and it dictates if and how other organisations can use our content in their products. Here we heard some passionate and mixed views.
Some wanted our content to be able to be used by anyone. This could see, for example, publishers using parts of Oak to create new textbooks, edtech providers integrating Oak’s content into their platforms, or teachers being able to access it more easily inside the other products they use in schools with their pupils.
While generally we lean towards the principle of “open” being a good thing, and for the public benefit, it’s not without its challenges. Some organisations have invested heavily in creating their existing resources and we heard valid concerns about the impact on this.
So we came back to teachers as our guiding light. Oak’s content will always be available for free. No charges, no paywalls, ever. Any teacher, school or organisation will be able to use, adapt or integrate our resources however they like (as long as it’s not a commercial offer). But we want to consider carefully whether we should do more.
So with the help of an independent and expert organisation, we’re going to look at the options, opportunities and risks that having a more open licence would have for pupils, teachers and the market.
Always free to access
Oak itself will never be commercial and the content will always remain free to access on Oak. If we were to share this content on a more open licence, other organisations could use it for free.
We’ll make a decision on this early next year, well ahead of us starting to share the new resources from September 2023, and we’ll be keen to hear views from across the sector.
While there are complications around sharing our content with commercial organisations, we will make Oak’s platform code freely available on an open-source MIT licence.
This allows other organisations (or tech-savvy schools) to use it to build or improve their own products. We’ll similarly openly share our anonymous data with the sector, helping share insights and what we learn about teachers and pupils. We’ll say more about this in future when we’re ready to make our code and datasets public.
Finally, many organisations that sell curriculum resources in the UK also sell them overseas. We want to see these organisations thrive as they export their teaching expertise around the world.
And, given our focus is supporting teachers in the UK, we’ll restrict access to Oak’s content to only those in the UK (although we’ll grant access to countries where there is a distinct crisis need, such as Ukraine).
Over the last two months, we’ve heard a range of useful and really valuable feedback. But the most valuable is that which is grounded in how we can best help teachers. That is first and foremost about sharing brilliant curriculum resources, but it’s also about making sure there is a vibrant choice of providers so teachers get to decide what’s best for their pupils.
John Roberts is director of product and engineering at Oak National Academy
