Oak National Academy

Baroness Blower Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2023 Grand Committee

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

My Lords, I have no interests to declare, except that I was extremely interested in the speech from the previous noble Lord. I have, from time to time as a teacher, of course, availed myself of textbooks and many other materials from the commercial education publishing sector. My brief intervention in this short debate, on which I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, is just to make a couple of points.

My first point is in relation to school funding. I understand that the current per capita funding for a secondary school pupil is about £6,000 per annum, which is not enough. As many of your Lordships know, schools are facing significant financial pressures and while the Minister will no doubt say that the Government are increasing funding, it remains too low. The fact that both the trade unions whose target audience is specifically heads and school leaders are either balloting for strike action or considering so doing is ample evidence for this.

I turn to the Oak academy. I have, as I have expressed previously, significant reservations about the Oak National Academy. My engagement with Jonathan Dando of the academy and my own perusal of the materials on offer, along with previous responses from the Minister—given, I have no doubt, in good faith—have done nothing to allay my concerns. I freely accept that the intervention of Oak academy materials during the pandemic played an important role in ensuring that distance learning could carry on, but that was of course supported heavily by the British Educational Suppliers Association and the Publishers Association—the figures have been previously given—to set Oak academy up in the first place.

However, the creation of Oak academy as an arm’s-length body, at a cost of £43 million to the taxpayer, is a different order of activity entirely. This £43 million will come from the DfE’s schools budget, which in my view is already too low. Yet research done by the British Educational Suppliers Association shows that only 5% of teachers polled by YouGov thought that centralised resources should be a priority, while 43% believed in funding schools so as to allow them to invest in materials that they thought worked best for them, and 36% believed that reducing class size would be a far better use of government money and would produce better outcomes for children and young people.

I think we all know that teacher workload is very high and burdensome, but it is not clear to me that the Oak academy materials, having spent time looking at them, would reduce workload—unless the Government intend to deprofessionalise teaching to a role of clicking play on a pre-recorded, one-size-fits-all, government-approved lesson. That is not an attractive proposition for a professional teacher, but it is in the same vein as the direction of travel for ITT referred to by my noble friend Lord Knight.

Of course, cost is a significant issue. The noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, put it completely aptly when he said that it is hard to compete with free. There is a big concern that the Oak academy materials will be perceived as being, if not compulsory, certainly preferred. This perception is reinforced by the promotion of Oak academy materials by Amanda Spielman, His Majesty’s chief inspector, at a conference in April last year and by Ofsted’s strong presence on Oak’s subject expert panels, which, according to the Oak briefing for this debate,

“will advise and shape our curriculum”.

Notwithstanding that the briefing note also says,

“Our materials will always be optional with no expectation of use”,


I think that Ms Spielman’s intervention tells schools a very different story.

I do not need to make the case for education publishers; they are making it themselves. However, in closing, I want to ask the Minister what she makes of the report I have had from an experienced colleague that they have been offered an Amazon voucher to join an Oak expert panel. Is that an appropriate use of taxpayers’ money? This colleague will, I am sure, use that voucher to buy some books.