The Department for Education is to start talks next week with the schools sector to seek views on how a new arm’s-length national curriculum body will operate, Tes understands.
A series of invitations are being sent out for webinars due to start next week to discuss how the Oak National Academy will run once it becomes a public body.
The DfE plans for the discussions to involve all parts of the sector, including education unions, heads, schools, trusts, publishers, commercial providers, subject associations and centres of excellence.
The DfE has said the webinars will seek feedback on the proposals “in order to further understand their potential impact on the educational support market”.
The plans for a national online academy were first mooted in the government’s Levelling Up White Paper in February, as revealed by Tes.
And Tes revealed that, as part of the plans, Oak would be made into a new government arm’s-length body designed to provide free curriculum resources to schools across the UK.
The discussions due to start next week will involve the department sharing its initial thinking about Oak’s future as an arm’s length body and seeking people’s views before final decisions are taken ahead of its planned autumn launch.
Oak National Academy as a curriculum resources provider
Tes understands that the fact that Oak’s resources will always be free, as well as the fact that it will be independent from government and not compulsory, have already been decided and are not part of the planned discussions.
Some of the topics the DfE will be seeking views on are the creation of full curriculum maps, full sets of lesson materials, lesson overview slides, quizzes and videos.
Conversations will also be had on the subjects that the national online academy will offer in the first year.
Tes understands that Oak plans to eventually offer a full subject range but will be limited in terms of resources in its first year.
The DfE has also published a prior information notice (PIN) today which it says aims to promote “early engagement” about upcoming webinars on the new arms length curriculum body.
The notice says: “The purpose of this PIN is to initiate market engagement on initial thinking about the aims and objectives of that organisation; the resources that the body will provide; and how it will go about doing so, recognising that these factors are of interest to commercial providers.
“Given decisions have not been made upon these factors, this PIN is not a call for competition, but is designed to gather feedback on potential design features that will guide a future procurement. The value of any potential future procurements is to be confirmed.”
Oak National Academy has been hosted by The Reach Foundation since its launch in April 2020, when schools were closed at the start of the coronavirus crisis.
Last year Tes revealed that Oak would remain free until spring 2022 and had received a further £2.1 million in government funding to “stay open” until the end of the current spring term to “support Covid-19 resilience and teacher workload”.
The funding followed the £4.3 million it received to continue providing remote learning support to schools until the end of the 2020-2021 academic year.
