The Department for Education “failed to properly diagnose” the problem it was trying to solve when it turned Oak National Academy into a government arm’s-length body, an edtech members’ body has warned.
The British Educational Suppliers Association (BESA), in its submission to the market review of Oak National Academy - exclusively shared with Tes - said the creation of the curriculum resources quango has negatively affected its members.
In a survey of BESA members, 70 per cent said Oak has had a “negative impact” on their domestic sales since its launch as an arm’s-length body, with 30 per cent describing the impact as “negligible”.
The submission comes after the Publishers Association wrote to the chancellor to warn of “significant market damage” caused by Oak.
The DfE is undertaking a market review of Oak, which became a government arm’s-length body in September 2022.
‘Millions squandered’ on Oak National Academy
Caroline Wright, director-general of BESA, said: “I am heartened by the new government’s willingness to conduct an independent review into the Oak National Academy. In a time of hugely stretched public resources, I hope that ministers will end the Oak vanity project that the Conservative government introduced and reinvest the much-needed millions squandered on Oak into other vital areas of school funding.”
“The transition from charitable resource to becoming an arm’s-length body from the DfE fundamentally changed the original rationale of Oak,” BESA said in its submission.
Oak National Academy was initially set up during the Covid pandemic to provide online lessons and resources during lockdown. It was funded with £43 million over three years by the DfE when it was relaunched as an ALB.
BESA, along with the Publishers Association and the Society of Authors, has taken legal action against the government’s decision to make Oak an ALB. A judicial review is currently paused until September.
For its submission to the review, BESA surveyed members who operate in the same market as Oak, asking how its presence as an arm’s length body has impacted them. No members described the impact of Oak as positive.
Members told BESA that they have had to “scale back investment in new domestic product development”, “pause planned curriculum projects”, and “reduce updates to existing products” as a result of Oak becoming a quango.
One organisation, after 20 years of developing resources for music education, had to scale back planned work because “they cannot compete with Oak’s free, government-endorsed service”, BESA said.
Oak’s AI ‘could stifle competition’
Oak National Academy was given “up to £2 million” of additional government funding in 2023 to build artificial intelligence tools to help reduce teachers’ workload, and last year it launched Aila, an AI-powered lesson assistant.
While BESA welcomed the government embracing AI for schools, it warned that Oak’s development of AI tools is in “direct competition to existing commercial products”, and said this is threatening to “stifle” the growing AI work of edtech providers.
BESA said that Oak’s free and government-backed resources create an “uneven playing field” and “undermine innovation and investment in the commercial sector”.
It also highlighted that Oak changes how it measures teacher usage of its resources between different impact reports, saying that it does not have “confidence in making year-on-year comparisons using Oak’s self-reported data”.
“Oak’s calculation of users has historically been a challenge for us to recognise. The nature of the Oak website, in particular the fact that they do not require logins to access their resources, by nature makes it more difficult to precisely measure the number of unique users accessing the platform.”
In its most recent impact report, Oak recorded the download of a combination of resources as one download because teachers do this together. In previous years Oak had counted the download of individual resources separately.
An Oak National Academy spokesperson told Tes at the time that when comparing with the same measure, which it had used previously of counting downloads separately, teachers downloaded 2.8 million Oak resources in 2023-24 compared with 1.13 million resources in 2022-23.
Commenting on the BESA submission, an Oak spokesperson said: “Oak National Academy is having a significant, proven impact on the lives of teachers. Teachers who use Oak work five fewer hours per week, have higher wellbeing, are more likely to see themselves staying in teaching, and have increased their curriculum expertise.
“The number of teachers using Oak has risen sharply since our new resources started rolling out in autumn 2023. One in three teachers now directly uses Oak, up 206 per cent since this time last year.
“Three in four (73 per cent of users) say Oak has had a positive impact on their workload, and the same proportion said Oak’s curriculum has led them to make meaningful improvements to their school curriculum or to lesson delivery.”
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