Oak National Academy

Oak National Academy is an organisation providing an online classroom and resource hub in the UK. It provides teachers with free lessons and resources for pupils aged from 4 to 16, from reception to year 11. Oak also includes a specialist curriculum for supporting pupils who normally attend specialist settings.
Oak was created in response to the 2020 United Kingdom education shutdown during the coronavirus pandemic. It will be available for teachers to use throughout the 2020/21 academic year to support schools with online learning.
Governance.
Oak National Academy has been incubated as part of the Reach Foundation in Feltham, registered charity 1129683.
Oak’s leadership team consists of:
Oak’s project board consists of:
History.
The Oak National Academy was set up by a North London free school. 
It is an online classroom and resource hub created in response to the closure of schools during the coronavirus pandemic. which provided free online lessons and resources to pupils from reception to year 10. It published a specialist curriculum for pupils who normally attend specialist settings.
It was announced on Sunday 19th April, and received the backing of the Department for Education. It delivered two million lessons in its first week of operation.
On Tuesday 23rd June, the government announced that Oak National Academy would be given £4.3 million funding to provide lessons for pupils for the 2020/21 academic year as a contingency plan for the continuing pandemic. Teachers will be recording lessons over summer 2020 and will be reimbursed for their time.
Description.
The material is accessed from a free website, sortable by year group and subject or schedule.
From April 2020, teachers from English state schools created and uploaded video lessons each week. Every lesson is an hour long and includes a quiz, a video explanation from the teacher, and a worksheet. 
From April 2020, the TES and Oak National Academy ran weekly assemblies. Speakers have included the Duchess of Cambridge and the Archbishop of Canterbury.
During the school holidays, Oak ran online activity clubs for pupils to take part in. These were provided by organisations like the Scouts, Bite Back 2030 and Jamie’s Farm and include activities like cook-a-long, arts and debating clubs.
Impact.
Oak commissioned research in late spring 2020 to understand who was using the platform and what improvements they wanted. To meet schools’ needs, Oak released its curriculum plan for 2020/21 in July and prepared the majority of lessons for September. 
In total, over 4.7m people had visited Oak in its first term, with an average of 220,000 users each day. People who had visited the Oak website had taken part in just under 20 million lessons which included 15 million hours of video material. 
The research also looked at why teachers are using Oak. Reduced workload and improving the quality of teaching and learning were reported by teachers as being the two biggest motivations for using Oak. A third of teachers said that their main motivation for using Oak was to help them manage their workload; 27% referenced the main benefit as improving the quality of teaching and learning they could offer.
Potential barriers to teachers using Oak were also identified. Over 40% of teachers who don't use Oak said that the lack of alignment with their school’s curriculum was the reason they didn't use the platform. In response, Oak has set up a series of advisory groups to make sure it works for as many schools as possible. Oak also released its curriculum plan for 2020/21 in July to help schools plan. 
A quarter of the teachers surveyed also explained that their pupils do not have internet at home. Oak stated, where copyright allows, it will make resources downloadable with content that can be edited locally for 2020/21.