Most organisations will have a story to tell about how they came into being and how they developed – a kind of foundational myth. With the Oak National Academy, from the beginning, I’ve had a kind of vague ‘teacher start-up’ story in my mind, no doubt reflecting this kind of text on their website and the narrative established on social media. I became intrigued to find out a little more when I heard the announcement in June 2020 that the organisation would receive in excess of £4 million to continue and to expand its remit to include sequences of learning. Given the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition got rid of the QCDA, which would have had a similar role, this is quite important.
My question was essentially a simple one. Is this a story of a plucky group of teachers getting together to kick-start a project with a little government money, or does this represent something else? So far, I’ve just produced the network diagram to show who is involved and readers can make their own interpretation.
The first thing to stand out is that, although Matt Hood was indeed a teacher (for the 2 years of his Teach First programme, and later for 2 years part time as an Assistant Head) he has also established the Ambition Institute (set up as a graduate school for teachers, but separate from the HE sector) and spent two stints as a DfE advisor. Interestingly from November 2019 onwards (apparently into the COVID-19 crisis) he was an advisor to the DfE and thus it would seem that the plans for Oak were drawn up by Hood when he was already a DfE advisor (at least the dates on his Linked In profile suggest that overlap). He is of course a teacher, and his advisory expertise was in CPD, but that seems to me to be a useful additional bit of information to add to the story of Oak’s genesis. Similarly, whilst several of the other key players are teachers, they are also representatives of what we might call ‘edu-business’, including staff from / on secondment from a private tutoring company, an organisation offering legal services to non-unionised teachers, and Teach First. Similarly, those senior leaders involved are almost exclusively drawn from MATs (Ark, Reach, United Learning, Tenax and Lord Agnew’s Inspiration Trust).
In a sense none of this should be a surprise, it’s a reflection of the new educational policyscape, where all of these ‘independent’ actors operate in networks where a shared worldview and way of working generates the capacity to generate new forms of policy and practice. This gives the appearance of independence, but the links with the DfE and the alignment with the DfE worldview means it is not independent in the way we might imagine.
Some people will look at this and be grateful that this new policyscape has unleased such amazing energy and capacity for responsive leadership. Others will be slightly suspicious that all these people in key positions of influence just happen to be in the same place at the same time again, offering the government a mechanism for developing curriculum planning practices which is, as yet, unaccountable in any obvious way. When the QCDA devised curriculum guidance and exemplar planning, it was generally done through consultation with the relevant subject communities and ultimately the senior public officials and Ministers took responsibility. I’m not entirely sure today where those lines of policy accountability lie. But I am struck that a fully resourced curriculum model and expenditure in excess of £4m should probably have some clearly published standards associated with them.
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