Oak National Academy is to start paying its teachers for their online lessons after receiving more than £4 million in government funding for the 2020-21 academic year. 

The online school announced today that it will adapt its offer for schools, offering resources for both school- and home-based learning next year, and Tes can reveal it will now pay teachers for the lessons they create for the platform.

Oak National principal Matt Hood said teachers would now be paid “sensible market rates” for the activities they create.

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“For our first term, we relied on a huge amount of generosity from everybody involved in the partnership in all different ways,” he said. “That isn’t sustainable for the long run - now that we have more time, we’ve gone back to look at what are the actual costs of running this.”

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Mr Hood added that the academy had been “set up at incredible pace over the Easter holidays by a few hundred people, most of them on a voluntary basis to get things off the ground”, but that now there would be more time to plan for a slightly different approach for next year.

Oak National is hoping to create 10,000 lessons over the next two months, and Mr Hood said the academy was looking to recruit 300 teachers to help it achieve this. He will be staying on as principal of the online school for the next year. 

“We need about 300 teachers for that process - we are working with schools and subject associations to bring teachers on board,” he said.

Oak National has said it will “collaborate with a wide group of teachers and school leaders to develop lessons” and Mr Hood told Tes that he wanted to ensure plans “are as broad and representative of the sector as they can possibly be”.

“So that means we have been speaking and consulting regularly with the various sector organisations, so that includes the [Chartered] College [of Teaching], it includes the Teaching Schools Council, it also includes ASCL [the Association of School and College Leaders] and the NAHT, NASUWT and NEU.

“The thing to emphasise here is that Oak is a collaboration between a large group of teachers, school leaders and others who are working together to provide something for the whole system.

“And as we move from this first period, which was about making resources available whilst pupils are primarily, although not exclusively, at home, the second period is going to be about providing a backstop for schools so that in the situation where pupils might not be in for a variety of reasons - and we are all hoping that that isn’t necessary…we’re hoping that in that scenario we can be a helpful contribution to a national effort,” he said.