Oak National Academy

Lord Vaizey of Didcot Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2023 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the impact of their funding for Oak National Academy on the publishing and education technology sectors in the United Kingdom.

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to have an opportunity to discuss this important subject. I want to take this opportunity to put on record my praise for the maiden speech of my noble friend Lord Evans, which I was lucky enough to hear as I came in to prepare for this debate. May I also put on record my nervousness at appearing between my noble friend Lady Barran, one of our most formidable Ministers, and my noble friend Lady Evans, our former Leader of the House? I know this at least: both of them are going to give me both barrels. I have no idea what the other noble Lords and noble Baronesses in the Room are going to say on this issue.

I must quickly declare my interests. I advise a number of education technology companies, including Digital Futures and Perlego; they are not affected by Oak National Academy. I chair the UK-ASEAN Business Council, which includes Pearson as a member. I am a governor of St Paul’s School. I also advise an investment fund that invests in an education technology company that is nervous about Oak.

About 15 years ago, when I was a Member of Parliament in Oxfordshire, which has a significant number of education publishing companies, the BBC set up a free education service for schools called BBC Jam. It was a noble endeavour. We will talk about the pandemic in a moment—and we saw what a great and important role the BBC played during that time in terms of supporting our children. However, a lot of my constituents who worked for those education publishers came to me to raise their concerns, which I, as their MP at the time, felt were perfectly legitimate. They were in private companies that had to make a profit and compete in the marketplace but, frankly, when it comes to providing curriculum resources for schools, it is very hard indeed to compete against what is free. They felt that the BBC was overreaching itself, despite its noble aim in doing this, and had not taken account of the impact that its resources would have on the thriving private sector market that existed in the UK. I campaigned against it. It is not popular to campaign against motherhood and apple pie, but we were successful because, luckily, unlike the Government, the BBC had a regulator at the time, the BBC Trust, which looked at this matter and was under an obligation to look at the market impact of BBC initiatives. It decided that BBC Jam was a step too far, and withdrew the service.

Now, we switch to today and the Oak National Academy, which I would assert is a similar intervention in what is a very important marketplace. Again, Oak was set up with the absolute best of intentions. It was there to support our children during the pandemic, when they had to learn at home. It was a platform for education technology companies and education publishers. Indeed, I am given to understand that education technology companies gave something like £24 million-worth of resources, as they quantify it, to the Oak platform for free, while education publishers donated something like £8.5 million-worth of free content to Oak.

At the time it was, I believe, regarded as a temporary and appropriate intervention at a time when almost all pupils were having to take lessons and be taught online to ensure that a core curriculum of resources was available online. Obviously, it would be quite difficult for technology resources that a school had procured and that existed on its own systems then to be translated to individual pupils while they were working at home. However, unfortunately, it has proved not to be a temporary measure. Last year, the Oak National Academy became an arm’s-length body. It has £43 million of funding over three years, it is apparently intending to recruit, or has already recruited, something like 83 staff over the next three years, and its mission is to distribute a full set of curriculum resources. The announcement was made in March 2022, and the business case was published only in November after, in fact, Oak had already been established as an arm’s-length body.

Oak has one achievement to its name: it has already united the British Educational Suppliers Association, the Publishers Association, the Society of Authors—not known for its radical nature—and the teaching unions to oppose it and raise their concerns. My concern is that, in publishing, we have one of the most successful creative industries in the world and, in our education technology sector, again, one of the most successful sectors in the world. The education publishing sector alone in this country is worth some £552 million, about £354 million of which is exports. Some 40% of European investment in education technology companies goes to companies based in the UK. It is the fourth-largest sector in the world. In terms of joined-up government, the Government have announced their intention to achieve a target of £35 billion in education exports by 2030. Obviously, a lot of that includes our highly successful universities attracting foreign students to come and study here, but there is no doubt that an education technology sector that has a thriving home market has the opportunity to expand around the world.

The creation of Oak has already had an impact. We find ourselves in the insidious position whereby individual companies that come and talk to me will not go public. That is for two reasons: first, they do not want, as it were, to bite the hand that could potentially feed them—they do not want to make an enemy of the Department for Education. Secondly, they rely on their investors to have confidence, so they will not go public and say, “I’m sorry. Our domestic market has been upended”, but they tell me that their investors are already saying to them, “We’re not going to put more money into you if you’re going to concentrate on the UK market. We want you to look at markets elsewhere because we don’t think the UK market is going to be viable in the long term.”

Another point, and this is not just to promote the private sector overall, is about understanding what teachers actually want—and I am sure that other noble Peers will have a much greater understanding of that. Lots of opinion polls and surveys are going around about whether Oak is helping or not helping teachers, but my fundamental concern is that teachers want access to the bespoke resources that suit them as individuals or as schools, and they want a wide choice in curriculum materials but, in effect and slightly insidiously—because Oak is not making it clear that it is effectively a creature of the Department for Education —they are getting a nationalised, one-size-fits-all technology resource on which they have to draw. The more this goes on, the less competition there will be in the sector, the less innovation there will be, and the less autonomy teachers will have in choosing the resources they feel are appropriate for them and their pupils. It is a kick in the teeth to the many entrepreneurs who have a genuine passion for the kind of companies they are creating to provide resources for our schools, and it is a threat to the employment of the many hundreds of thousands of people who work across the education publishing and technology sector.

The Government and my noble friend should perhaps address three or four important questions at the conclusion of this debate, but no doubt she will hear many other opinions. First, there appears to have been no real consultation about why the Oak National Academy would be turned into an arm’s-length body or on this incredibly important intervention in the education market without taking account of the wide variety of opinion on whether it was the right thing to do. There has been an impact assessment—but my second question is whether the Government are really going to keep a watching brief on what will happen to the sector, because they rejected the submissions they received about the potential impact on the market. There are also questions about the data protection policies of the Oak National Academy and its ability to share data with third parties. Is it going to be clear about how it uses the data that it gleans from teachers and schools and who it shares it with?

My final question is: what is the Government’s fundamental thinking behind creating the Oak National Academy? What do they want it to look like in three, five or 10 years’ time? Will it be, as people suspect, the one-size-fits-all resource for education technology? Will schools be discouraged from going out to other providers to find the resources that they need and want? Instead of being defensive about Oak, or trying to obfuscate the purpose of establishing it, the Government should be clear.

One of the greatest difficulties we have had, of course, is that we have had dozens of Education Ministers coming and going over the last couple of years—I think we had one who served for 24 hours. I first got engaged with this when Nadhim Zahawi was the Education Secretary; then it was somebody else and it is now Gillian Keegan. We need a Minister who is the department for slightly more than 10 minutes to take an interest and have a long-term view on this intervention.