More than half of teachers say they have not had their workload reduced by using Oak National Academy, according to a new survey.
Alleviating teacher workload within lesson planning is a now a key focus of Oak’s current strategy.
The 2022-23 independent evaluation of the curriculum resources quango’s work, published today, reveals that 54 per cent of teachers, responding to a survey, said that using its resources had not impacted on their workload.
And another 6 per cent said that Oak had actually added to their workload by an average of seven hours a week.
However, four in 10 teachers (40 per cent) said they had saved an average of four hours per week by using Oak resources - compared with 42 per cent of teachers saying they saved three hours per week in 2021-22.
Oak also announced today that it has opened its second opportunity for schools and academy trusts to bid for a share of £7 million in funding to produce lesson resources for the curriculum body.
This came alongside an announcement that Sir Ian Bauckham has now been appointed permanent chair of Oak National Academy.
He has has been serving as interim chair since the launch of the government arm’s length body in September 2022, and is currently chief executive and director of Tenax Schools Trust and chair of Ofqual.
Oak’s latest evaluation, carried out by ImpactEd, surveyed 1,302 participants who were both Oak users and non-Oak users.
Here are some of the key findings.
How does Oak affect teacher workload?
The survey found that Oak had a “positive” impact on working time.
In answer to the question “In your most recent full working week, approximately how many hours did you spend in total on activities related to your job?”, Oak users worked a mean of 31.5 hours compared with 42 hours a week of work for non-users.
However, ImpactEd noted an “apparent contradiction” in its research, as it also found that Oak users spent two hours a week more on lesson planning and preparation (an average of 10.7 hours a week for users compared with 8.8 hours for non-users).
ImpactEd admitted that “more research” is needed in order to understand the reasons for this - for instance, “whether Oak users are more likely to work part time and non-users full time, or whether the length of time individuals have used Oak affects this outcome.”.
Oak users also considered workload to be less of an issue at their school, although more than half still reported teacher workload a “fairly” to “very serious problem” (64 per cent for users compared with 79 per cent for non-users).
Oak users were also more likely to report being able to complete their assigned workload during contracted working hours than non-users, with 29 per cent of users agreeing with this statement compared with 15 per cent of non-users.
Leaders who used Oak spent 15.1 hours less time, on average, on activities related to their job than senior leaders who didn’t.
Oak ‘improves staff wellbeing’
Wellbeing scores for Oak users were higher than for non-users, with a score of 43.76 compared with 40.65. These scores were produced using the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale.
The proportion of Oak users who anticipated they would no longer be working in education in two years’ time was also notably lower than for non-users - 9 per cent compared with 29 per cent.
This also compared favourably with the national benchmark, whereby 16 per cent of education professionals anticipated they would no longer be working in education in the next two years.
Resources more common in secondary schools
A quarter of teachers used Oak this year, based on a Teacher Tapp survey. Large spikes in usage of the resources coincided with teacher strikes during the previous academic year.
Oak is more heavily used in secondary schools than primary schools (61.4 per cent of secondary schools compared with 30.3 per cent of primary) and is used more in state schools (37 per cent) than independent schools (31.2 per cent).
It continues to be more frequently used in more disadvantaged areas, and maths and English are the most popular subjects for Oak resources.
For survey participants who did not use Oak, the most common reasons cited were already having access to lots of resources and believing that Oak resources are suitable for emergency use only.
Impact on curriculum
Seventy-eight per cent of teachers using Oak found that it had an impact on their curriculum.
Reka Budai, Oak’s research and evaluation manager, said: “Most teachers who participated in this research hadn’t adopted Oak wholesale. Instead, they had taken learnings from our model and applied it to their existing curriculum.
“They had swapped or added certain lessons based on our curricula (43 per cent), changed how they sequence their curriculum (29 per cent), and only 6 per cent started using our curriculum as their main curriculum sequence.”
Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “We completely support efforts to reduce teacher and leader workload, although it’s not clear from these findings whether Oak is having a positive impact in this regard.
“Our major concerns remain that Oak represents a drift towards a government-approved curriculum, and that their resources will undermine other providers to the detriment of the education sector.”
