A key government levelling up target for Oak National Academy to become fully operational as a UK-wide quango by autumn cannot be guaranteed, its chief has admitted today.
Speaking at the Confederation of School Trusts’ (CST) annual conference, Oak principal Matt Hood said that he couldn’t “guarantee anything” when asked if the deadlines for the launch of the new arm’s-length body (ALB) would be met.
It comes as Oak’s leader revealed the creation of the new body is a “complicated process”.
After the announcement that Oak would become an ALB in the levelling up White Paper, the Department for Education said it would be “fully operational” by autumn, with the first products available to teachers by September 2023.
In March, Tes revealed that Oak was to be made into a new ALB designed to provide free curriculum resources to schools across the UK.
‘A complicated process’
But expanding on the progress of the talks currently taking place with the DfE on the formation of the ALB, Mr Hood said there were “lots of conversations ongoing” and that it was a “complicated process”.
However, he said everybody was “working flat out” and were “keen to meet those deadlines”, to get Oak “running and operational by the autumn”.
He said that one of the most important things was the “continuity of the current provision”, which is “baked into lots of schools’ day-to-day working” and is “really, really important for teachers”.
Writing ahead of the CST conference today, Mr Hood said he understood that there may be concerns around the “tension” of “government policy”.
“No one”, he said, “including ministers, want Oak to be diverted by changing political winds, especially if they are contrary to the evidence and teachers’ needs”.
He added that to “help us manage the risk” of that tension, “a series of principles will be at the heart of the founding documents of the arm’s-length body”.
Speaking at the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) conference earlier this year, education secretary Nadhim Zahawi said that the new organisation would aim to work with a “diverse range of teachers and experts from across the sector to facilitate the creation of curriculum maps and thousands of downloadable lessons and resources, which will be made freely available to all teachers, parents and children.”
Yesterday, Tes revealed that legal action against the DfE over its plan to establish Oak as a new ALB had been paused at the eleventh hour.
The DfE is yet to finalise the details of the ALB, such as the nature and content of the curriculum resources and how they will be procured, as well as the funding of the organisation.
