Oak National Academy

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2023 Grand Committee

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, and thank him for bringing this to our attention. We should have had a longer and deeper debate on Oak National Academy before this point and the Government should have brought it before us, as this important initiative could change the education landscape. I agree with every word my noble friend Lord Knight said, and am probably going to say similar things—only not as well.

I want to make two points. The first is about the motivation for this. The impact assessment says that it wants to save teachers’ time and reduce the workload. One of the reasons given is that the 2014 national curriculum changes took away the framework of support for teachers, which now has to be replaced. That was eight years of things going wrong because of the inadequacy of the 2014 curriculum reforms and this is about trying to put that back in place.

What worries me most and what I just cannot get my head around is this. If you went to teachers and said, “We are the Government and we have millions of pounds; what do you most want us to do to take workload off your shoulders?”, none of them would say, “Give a pile of money to the Oak National Academy and let it produce off-the-shelf lesson plans and curriculum packages.” The irony is that the DfE and Ofsted have argued for this. If you asked teachers who they would most cite as putting pressure on them, they would say the DfE and Ofsted.

I just cannot think through the fact that we seem to be creating a system in which it is easier for teachers to use off-the-shelf lesson plans, as that would give them time to fill in returns for Ofsted and the DfE. I taught for 18 years and the thing I most wanted to do was a lesson plan. That is what I went into the job to do. It was my skill and my training. If teachers spend half an hour a day looking for information on the internet, then thank goodness; they are professionals. That is what they are meant to be doing. Why would you put in place something that meant that a science teacher or similar was not spending half an hour a day looking for up-to-date information on the internet? If the Government want to reduce workload, I suggest that they are going about it the wrong way.

I think this is about control. The evidence for that is in the impact statement. The summary asks why Oak was chosen. It could not be the DfE, because the teachers would not trust it. It could not be private sector procurement, because it would not be “aligned with government policy”. Think about that: the Government are not doing it themselves, because they know that teachers do not trust them, and they are not putting it out to tender, because they do not trust private sector publishers to align with government policy, so they have set up an arm’s-length body to—as the impact statement says time and again—align with government strategy. That is the giveaway.

I have a great deal of time for the person who runs Oak. He is a star. He is a young educationalist who I hope has more and more influence on our education system in years to come, but this has not done Oak any favours.

My second point is to reiterate the point that the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, made about the BBC. It is the reason; it is the whole rationale. If you need one argument against this, it is: use the BBC. I tried a digital curriculum from the BBC prior to this, and what we were going to do was wonderful. We lost in the courts and some people’s professional careers were damaged because of that. It would have been good, and it would have had all the accountability, visibility and openness that the BBC would have brought to the process. I justified that because it is a public sector broadcaster, but Oak has none of that: it is not a public sector broadcaster, it does not have a public sector remit and it does not have that accountability. There are a number of reasons why we should ask the Government to reconsider.