Oak is changing.
As you know Oak National Academy came about over a very short timescale during the 2020 Easter holiday as a coming together of teachers, schools and academy trusts. They had the vision, and some capacity, to pull together a fully functioning virtual school to be a resource for fellow teachers, other schools and their pupils.
The next big change came in 2022. Oak became an independent public body focused on creating and supporting in-class teaching resources built around a high-quality curriculum. We’re well on our way in shifting from a focus on independent, remote education spurred by the pandemic, to helping to tackle two major issues:
- Helping teachers manage their lesson planning workload so they can spend more time focusing on their pupils.
- building expertise, guiding teachers and school staff towards models and advice that help professionals in the sector to improve their schools’ own curriculum.
What now? After a rigorous tendering process we are delighted to be working with The Cam Academy Trust under the direction of Rachel Hawkes, former ALL president, in order to create new resources for languages. We aim for a carefully sequenced curriculum with plenty of opportunity for practice and recombination of language knowledge to develop independence, a love of language learning as well as cultural curiosity and understanding.
We can’t wait to share with you the brilliant new curriculum plans and lesson resources which are already in development. They will be gradually released starting in the autumn of 2024. There will be resources at KS2 for French and Spanish and at KS3 and KS4 for French, German and Spanish. The KS4 resources will be aligned with both the Edexcel and AQA new GCSE specifications. You can continue to use all our existing lessons until then, and beyond.
Only teachers know what’s right for their class, so they’ll always need to choose what, if anything, suits their needs. And they’ll always need to contextualise and tailor the resources to their pupils.
We just hope we can free up some of your time to spend on other ways to support your pupils.
Alice Harrison- Subject Lead for Languages at Oak National Academy. [email protected]