How Oak National Academy Is Transforming Classrooms with AI and OER

Q: What are the mission, goals and origin story of Oak National Academy?

At Oak, we’re working to improve pupil outcomes and close the disadvantage gap by supporting UK teachers to teach, and pupils to access a high-quality curriculum.

We were originally set up during the Covid-19 pandemic to support British schools with their remote learning offer, but a lot’s changed since then.

Our focus has now shifted to supporting high-quality in-class teaching across the UK. We’ve worked with expert schools and organisations to produce free, adaptable curriculum and lesson resources that support our teachers to plan and deliver great lessons across all subject areas. Everything is available on an open licence so schools and trusts, public organizations and tech developers in the UK can all access Oak content freely. That is a fundamental principle for us.

Q: What has your role been?

I co-founded Oak in 2020, and am currently leading the organization as Interim CEO. I was previously Director of Product and Engineering. I helped launch the first version of Oak back in April 2020, when schools in England first closed due to pandemic restrictions. We got it up and running in just a couple of weeks, and I built up the product and engineering team from there.

Q: How did you go about getting Oak’s work off the ground?

The early days of Oak were all about helping schools adapt to a new, unfamiliar reality as quickly as possible. Schools in England closed to most pupils on Friday, 20th March 2020. Exactly a month later, with the help of expert teachers from some of the leading schools in England and funding from the Department for Education, we launched the first iteration of Oak complete with video lesson content to support remote learning. From April 2020 to July 2021, 130 million of our lessons had been taken by pupils learning in lockdown.

When the pandemic came to an end, we were left with a real appreciation of what freely accessible, curated curricula and lesson resources could offer. They’d been helpful in a time of crisis, but they could also serve the public good in terms of supporting high-quality in-person teaching. The UK government also saw the value this could have for our education system, and so allocated us the funds to set up collaborative partnerships with subject experts to get resource development underway.

Q: When you think about the accomplishments of Oak National Academy thus far, what are you most proud of?

We’ve achieved a huge amount in our short history. From the early days, supporting millions of pupils across the UK to access teaching in unprecedented circumstances during the pandemic, to now, as we complete the world’s first digitised, machine-readable national curriculum. I am also really proud that we were able to develop and launch our AI-powered lesson assistant, Aila. This was the first publicly funded generative AI tool available to the public in the UK.

It’s really exciting to think about how we can build on this strong foundation to further innovate our education system.

“Using Oak as a framework for the curriculum ensures we have a quality starting point, but it also allows for teacher autonomy. Teachers can make their own adaptations but the Oak framework ensures we have consistent quality," Secondary School Head of English, UK

Q: What has been the most challenging?

Developing our resources has meant drawing on a broad range of expertise from across the UK education sector. Collaboration on such a large scale always brings logistical challenges, but it’s been incredible to see how the team and our brilliant curriculum partners have pulled together.

What we’ve created together is a complete view of what a high-quality curriculum looks like in England, across every national curriculum subject, down to the individual lesson level. It’s never been done before, and its value can’t be overstated.

Q: What impact has Oak had in the UK education system so far?

We monitor our impact in the system really carefully, with annual independent research that checks whether our work is having the desired effect.

The most recent study found that one in three teachers in the UK are using our resources, that’s nearly 200,000 nationally. What’s really exciting is that this represents an 115% increase in usage: as more and more of our resources have been released, teachers’ appetite to use them has grown in tandem.

Not only that, but Oak users work almost five fewer hours per week compared to those who don’t. Nearly 75% reported a positive impact on their workload, either saving them time outright or freeing them up for other high priority areas of their practice.

"I think what has been huge is the reduction in workload. Using the Oak curriculum has lifted a huge cognitive load from teachers. And then having plans available for lesson delivery has been really appreciated as a way to get you started,” Primary School Deputy Headteacher, UK

Q: What has been the impact of OER and AI?

The free availability of high-quality models allows all UK schools to access resources that raise teaching standards and save them considerable time that can be better spent focussing on pupils. Already, we’re seeing Oak’s resources are saving users almost 5 hours a week. Teachers who use Oak also have better wellbeing and are more likely to see themselves staying in the profession long-term.

We’ve also seen a surge in the popularity of AI amongst teachers across the UK recently. Significant numbers are looking to AI to bring greater efficiency to different parts of their practice. But most generic tools haven’t been built for the classroom, or the English national curriculum, so fall short when it comes to quality and safety. We’ve done a lot of work in this area, and released our AI-powered lesson assistant, Aila, last September. Aila has been robustly designed with a variety of guardrails and safety mechanisms. It harnesses the power of AI to support efficient lesson planning in a way that teachers can trust.

Q: We know that bias is a major issue for educational AI tools. How has Oak tackled this to make Aila fit for use in UK classrooms?

AI tools themselves aren’t intrinsically biased. But if the data they draw on to produce their outputs is, that’s a problem.

Our AI tool, Aila, has been engineered to prioritize drawing from our digital resources, which have been designed with diversity and inclusion in mind. This means, when a UK teacher produces a lesson with Aila, the tool will first scan a high-quality, representative dataset to see whether it can build exclusively from our quality assured content which is aligned to the national curriculum in England.

Where this isn’t possible, it then widens the search to the internet. Because of the risk this entails, we put a lot of thought into how best to monitor Aila’s output, and landed on an auto-evaluation mechanism that checks each result.

Q: Are there any emerging trends we’re seeing in the international development of AI?

Globally, we’ve seen a lot of excitement about what AI can do to support education and a lot of different use cases are already being explored. Our AI tool, Aila, is built to help UK teachers plan and resource lessons more efficiently, without cutting corners on quality and safety.

Internationally, the general trend looks to be that lower income countries are prioritizing direct to pupil AI solutions, such as tutoring via WhatsApp. At the other end of the spectrum, the infrastructure around AI use is being prioritized. So, thinking about regulation that helps make educational AI tools fit for purpose, digitising the curriculum so it can be processed by AI, or supporting teachers’ AI literacy to help them use it to its full potential.

Also, as with many things, smaller jurisdictions are at a massive advantage from a mobilization point of view. Scaling AI across larger, and perhaps more stratified, populations can be much more complex, and therefore costly.

Q: We’ve heard some in the US say that positive change occurred in their school districts when they decided to invest in teachers instead of textbooks. Does this align with what you are building in the UK at Oak National Academy?

Teachers are the most important part of any education system. Setting them up for success is fundamental to their effectiveness.

Our work is all about supporting UK teachers to work at their best - offering them a high-quality starting point for curriculum and lesson planning so that it doesn’t consume working hours that could be better spent on other teaching activities, or themselves.

Q: What does success look like for Oak National Academy in five years?

Success for us is always measured by the impact our work is having in schools across the country. We’re excited to build on the work of the past five years, and explore new ways of saving UK teachers’ time whilst supporting their curriculum expertise.

The valuable bedrock of resources we’ve created so far provides a great platform from which to progress this work.

"I would always visit Oak if I was stuck for inspiration, I found it was a good baseline to start with and the way they do things made me think differently about my own lessons and resources,” Secondary School Science Specialist, UK

Q: What could educators in the US learn from the Oak National Academy?

Our resources are built for UK teachers as they align to our national curriculum in England. But I think the underlying principles of our work are relevant for US teachers.

Curriculum and lesson design is hard, time-consuming work. Using high-quality models as a starting point can help you expand your professional expertise and help you take back time for yourself, or for other important areas of your work.