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Oak Academy: Curriculum quango business case 'questionable'

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A judicial review has been lodged challenging the DfE’s business case for setting up the Oak National Academy curriculum quango. Dr James Williams believes the DfE’s evidence to be thin and very questionable

 

The Department for Education has set out a “business case” (DfE, 2022a) for the setting up of an arm’s length body to provide curriculum resources for schools.

The body selected is Oak – the “academy” that quickly responded to the pandemic by providing online curriculum resources for schools. The DfE will task the new Oak quango or national arm’s-length body to commission further resources from teachers and others, then make them freely available. The amount of money required to deliver this is estimated to be £42.5m and some £39.3m has been secured. This is now subject to a judicial review launched by the British Educational Suppliers Association (BESA), the Publishers Association, and the Society of Authors.

The two key factors that apparently require the setting up of this quango are supposed weaknesses in current curriculum provision for the 2014 national curriculum and teacher workload.

But exactly what is the evidence the DfE uses to make its case? In short it is thin and very questionable.

The curriculum weakness is based on Ofsted research (2019). In phase 1 of this research, the inspectorate visited 41 schools. At no point do we know what type of schools these are, how they were selected, their characteristics or roughly where they are. There’s no need to name the individual schools, but Ofsted must set out the context so that the reader understands where the research took place.

Ofsted also ran focus groups, talked to parents, and looked at school websites for curriculum information. Again, there is no real detail on the focus groups: Were these different from the 41 schools? Who was invited? On what grounds? Was it a serendipitous sample or a genuine sample properly selected according to set criteria?

Parents are important in children’s education, but how many are informed about the curriculum, what it should be and what a good curriculum looks like? As for scouring websites for curriculum information, how many schools put up the full curriculum with explanatory notes on how it is constructed and how it operates – or is it just a list of units and modules covered? I suspect it’s the latter.

Yet in the DfE business case the statement to support the “weaknesses” comes only from the phase 1 aspect of the Ofsted research. It ignores phase 2 where there was evidence of good practice and innovative curriculum design, where 33 schools were visited. They also ignored phase 3 of the research which found that it was the breadth of the curriculum on offer that was an issue but that: “The curriculum is delivered much more effectively and with wider coverage in core subjects than it is in foundation subjects” (a finding from inspections of 69 schools).

The DfE is misusing what is, in my opinion, poor research to make a case for gifting millions to a project which has been told to ensure it stays in line with DfE and government ideology. It may be at arm’s length, but it will not be independent.

The second part of their case relates to workload. I agree that teacher workload is a major issue. In my view, teachers are asked to teach far too many lessons each week and that has never really been addressed.

The answer is not to deliver to teachers pre-planned lessons or even a pre-planned commercial government curriculum. As the DfE itself states, teachers adapt resources from a range of online sources, planning lessons “specific (to the) context of their school and pupils … and (this) will continue to be a central part of teachers’ professional role”.

So, what are the dangers here? Although I do not know the whole of the current Oak provision, I have looked at a series of key stage 3 science units and found them to be less than satisfactory, with errors of scientific fact, poor explanations with a highly repetitive question and answer format contained within a set of basic PowerPoints. Having voiced these concerns online, I was contacted by Oak and asked for feedback.

The process of quality assurance needed for such a curriculum resource exercise is very stringent and requires deep expertise. As a former key stage 3 textbook and resource writer myself I know how long the production of high-quality resources takes – it is a matter of years, not weeks or months. You need large teams of experts in design, proof-reading, reviewing etc.

Although the DfE states that the Oak offering will be “optional”, they have already decided in advance that this will be a high-quality curriculum (though I dispute what is currently on offer is a curriculum at all – it’s a basic set of resources of highly variable quality). What is their evidence that this is or will be high quality?

What about the workload? These resources will not save teachers many hours of work. Oak’s own research, cited in the DfE’s business case (p49) shows that their platform saves only 8.4 minutes per-teacher, per-week on average for all teachers (Oak users and non-users alike). However, Oak says this figure could be up to three hours for teachers who use the platform (Roberts, 2022).

The problem is that the provision of Oak or any other material will not release more time in sufficient amounts for workload to be reduced to an acceptable level.

As the DfE says, the profession of teaching is to structure the learning across the curriculum and plan lessons that meet the local context. Yes, teachers need banks of resources, high-quality diagrams, pictures, videos, adaptable worksheets etc. But as professionals we cannot simply download a unit from any curriculum provider and just use it off the shelf.

This government and many previous administrations have never fully addressed the elephant in the room that is the volume of teaching we require all teachers to fulfil every week.

If the DfE does want to improve the curriculum, improve examination results, and have a world-beating education system, the answer is to reduce the teaching load for all teachers so that their professional knowledge can create the excellent curriculum that suits the needs of their children.

Retention would also improve and we would not be in the position of having to train tens of thousands of graduates each year only for so many of them – 31.2% at the last count (DfE, 2022b) – to burn-out and leave within five years. Teaching would become, like it is in many Scandinavian countries, a profession young people are keen to enter.

  • Dr James Williams is a senior lecturer in education in the School of Education and Social Work at the University of Sussex. He is a former key stage 3 textbook and resource writer. His current book is How to Read and Understand Education Research and you can find him on Twitter @edujdw

 

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