Is Oak National Academy going to eat UK publishers' lunch?
An industry-killer strikes terror into the heart British educational publishers with echoes of a creature killed off long ago. Could an ancient evil be back?
[A torch is the only source of light.]
Gather round. Let me tell you a scary story…
[The wind howls. A spray of rain hits a window pane. Thunder rolls.]
The British Government has set aside millions of pounds to fund an arm's length independent body to provide free curriculum-specific digital content.
Extraordinary action is required. The die is cast. The British Educational Suppliers Association (BESA) will take legal action against the government. The Director General of scrawls a missive:
As learning resources move online, schools are being offered free resources, centrally commissioned with a government stamp of approval. Educational publishing firms fear that this will eradicate the diversity and innovation that they have made the hallmark of learning resources in the UK.
[A record skips. The lights come on.]
Wait, what? That’s former Director General Dominic Savage writing in 2002 about BBC Jam. That bête noire was eventually slain in 2007. The threat is dead and buried.
And yet [crazed whisper] it’s happening again. The government is ploughing £35 million into Oak National Academy to provide free curriculum materials for core subjects… Once more the Director General, now Caroline Wright, rides out as the industry’s knight gallant, threatening to take on the government.
If this is a horror franchise, is it a remake, a reboot, or a sequel?
The demon headmaster
Gavin Williamson, Education Secretary 2019–21, garnered a reputation during the pandemic as a poor planner (Exhibit A: exams) and the kind of man who would cross a road to pick a fight (Exhibit B: war with unions). Since he was an ex-whip – and therefore knew every skeleton in every closet – he was largely beyond reprimand. If his tenure was a joke, his subsequent knighthood was the punchline.
So here’s something I thought I’d never write: Gavin Williamson did something good in the early days of Oak National Academy – he didn’t get in the way. [Slow clapping.] Nice one, Gav.
Oak was initially developed as a rapid response to a national emergency. The Institute for Government describes the early days.
Matt Hood, a founder of the Ambition Institute, a national education charity, developed a briefing for an online classroom, following discussions with David Thomas, headteacher at Jane Austen College. He shared this with Tom Shinner, a former director of strategy at the Department for Education (DfE), and Chris Paterson, deputy director at DfE. Within a few days they discussed whether it could be one of the measures used to fill the void created by the absence of face-to-face teaching. After further discussion with Rory Gribbell, a special adviser to the then schools minister Nick Gibb, they put the proposal informally to the secretary of state for education, Gavin Williamson.
In parallel, a newly forming Oak team were already having discussions with schools, leading multi-academy trusts (MATs) and other interested parties. DfE supported Oak’s plan to develop the curriculum and deliver its content in collaboration with partners. Central to this was a group of Teach First alumni who, though not all personally acquainted, shared a common mindset.
The government focused its efforts on funding, playing a facilitative role – with
the secretary of state giving the project momentum by agreeing that officials and advisers could support the Oak team’s work. Oak got key MATs on board to support content development, with Rachael de Souza, chief executive of the Inspiration Trust, supporting Matt Hood to co-ordinate them; and they secured the services of furloughed colleagues from a range of education charities, platform hosts and a branding agency in a matter of days. They rapidly created content to deliver a ‘minimum viable product’, with eight days to create the first week’s lessons, build the platform, launch the academy and raise awareness.
The pandemic period was a Wild West of government procurement. If you met Health Secretary Matt Hancock down the pub you were as likely to receive a PPE contract as a groping behind closed doors. Personal connections were key to Oak’s inception.
Initially, Oak received £498,000 of DfE funding for its first three months. Few people batted an eye.
When it received a further injection of £3.2 million for the next six months, questions started to be asked.
But a further £43 million over three years when all pandemic restrictions had been dropped…
We thought we buried it, but it’s back!
I know what you did last summer
Step back in time to 2003, a period of pump-priming for digital learning. eLearning Credits were introduced, providing schools with an annual per-pupil allowance to spend on digital learning content. And Tessa Jowell, the Labour Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, commissioned BBC Jam.
BBC Jam was intended to stimulate innovation in digital pedagogy and to be distinctive from – yet complementary to – the commercial offer available to schools. It would be both a content development operation and a commissioning hub. Of its £150 million budget, £45 million would be spent on content from commercial education producers.
However, the commercial sector was up in arms. On announcement of the plans, BESA began to mobilise.
A cap of 50% on curriculum coverage was introduced. Tessa Jowell announced:
I've listened to the concerns of commercial providers of digital learning resources about the impact of Digital Curriculum will have on the market. The industry is a rapidly expanding one. There is room for everyone. These conditions will prevent the BBC from dominating this market, but it's right that it should play an important role in a competitive and growing market for digital learning resources.
The government wasn’t going to back down, so the commercial sector went to the European Commission. The EU took a dim view of state intervention in commercial markets, and so in 2007 BBC Jam was axed.
The assembled publishers stood dirty-handed over the shallow unmarked grave dug by the light of their Ford station wagon. It was over and they’d survived, but no one could ever know. As the night wind sifted the desert sands, they made a pact. They’d never talk about this again…
Scream 2
The way I see it, someone's out to make a sequel. You know, cash in on all the movie murder hoopla. So, it's our job to observe the rules of the sequel. Number one: the body count is always bigger. Number two: the death scenes are always much more elaborate. Carnage candy. And number three: never, ever, under any circumstances, assume the killer is dead.
So says Randy Meeks in Wes Craven’s, like, so post-modern 1997 slasher sequel.
If this is a sequel, things are different this time. Here’s how:
The internet is now a mature ecosystem. Wikipedia launched in 2001; YouTube in 2005; Khan Academy in 2008. Publishers have been competing with freely available content for close to 20 years.
Oak will provide complete lesson-by-lesson coverage for core subjects – Maths, English (language and literature), Science, History, Geography and Music – from Key Stage 1 to Key Stage 4. Compare this with BBC Jam’s modest coverage limitations.
Schools’ budgets are in a very different state. In cash terms, per pupil funding for 2021-22 was £380 higher than it was in 2010-11. But the low-inflation period post-financial crash is over – Consumer Price Inflation hit 10.1% in September. School budgets are frozen, yet need to cover increased energy costs and a teacher pay rise of 5% (which may yet increase, since teachers’ unions have voted to strike).
And so to Caroline Wright’s appealingly simple proposed solution:
Imagine, for example, if the £43 million funding allocated to the running costs of Oak was given directly to English schools – each school would receive £1,800, not far off the current average annual primary school spend on digital curriculum resources of £2,216 as our recent BESA Resources in English maintained schools 2022 report revealed.
‘We send £43 million to Oak National Academy. Let’s fund our schools instead.’ We should stick that on the side of a bus or something.
But like many bus-side slogans, it’s deceptively over-simplified.
The £43 million is spread over three years, so schools would receive an additional £600 per year for three years.
The cost of things to be covered by school budgets has increased significantly. The qualified teacher minimum salary in England outside London is £28k. An additional £600 wouldn’t touch the sides. It’s not even half a 5% pay increase for one teacher.
Back in August, TeacherTapp surveyed 400 school leaders asking what they could cut from their budgets to make ends meet. Curriculum resources were first against the wall.
And this was before Liz Truss, our mayfly prime minister, boldly drove up the cost of government borrowing. The Autumn Statement to 17 November to let this surge in borrowing costs pass out of the forecast.
But this is surely the Conservative Party’s endgame? A general election is due by January 2025 – if not before. A Labour government would kill the beast, wouldn’t they?
Here comes the jump scare.
In late October the opposition published the Labour Skills Council Report:
A recent report conducted by ImpactED into Oak Academy found that a higher proportion of pupils taught using Oak Academy resources were exceeding expectations compared to those who were not (22% vs 16%); and teachers reported improved wellbeing due to time saved and workload reduced.
[…] Modern technology facilitates this sharing of materials in a very positive manner. A Labour government should support the continued expansion of resource platforms such as Oak Academy as a means of providing more pupils with access to quality lessons, with the added benefit of reduced pressure on staff.
The call was coming from inside the house
I’m in the pocket of Big Book, so you might expect me to be on the side of the lumberjacks. But what if Oak isn’t the problem?
The issues around teacher workload in the UK have long been known. Publishers highlight the time-saving benefits for their wares (here’s the ur-example from the Publishers’ Association). And so does Oak.
Schools are heading into difficult times. In October, the National Association of Head Teachers warned that 50% of schools would be in deficit by the end of the year. By the end of 2023 it’ll be 90% of schools. With or without Oak, they’re looking at larger classes, fewer teaching assistants, cutting back on every last discretionary spend.
Ask yourself: Where do teaching and learning materials sit on schools’ priority list for spending compared with, say, paying staff and keeping the lights on?
Step back and consider the optics. Is it really a good look for the commercial sector to kick away the safety net of support support provided by Oak?
We have a(nother) new Prime Minister. Rishi Sunak came into office facing a £40 billion deficit, a creaking NHS in flu and covid season, more Brexit turmoil in Stormont, striking unions, war in Ukraine, and a barely governable coalition of his own party’s factions.
We have a new Secretary of State for Education, our fifth in four months(!). Gillian Keegan’s inbox includes a looming fight with teachers’ unions and demands from the Treasury to find savings.
The Publishers Association wrote to Rishi Sunak on his first day in office urging him to bin Oak. BESA will write to Gillian Keegan this week with the same plea. These letters ignore the scale of the crisis. Boilerplate replies will duly be sent by junior civil servants.
The truth is that the commercial market in the UK has been changing for a long time now. Large MATs are producing their own materials. School purchases from traditional publishers have been declining. There’s an increasingly diverse range of non-traditional competitors, which schools latch on to and discard on a rapid cycle.
In the current environment, publishers need to think about where they uniquely add value. Perhaps the growth areas will be parent purchases and direct-to-consumer models? Maybe it’s time to think differently about IP and licensing models for MATs? And could it finally be time for publishers to put the time, effort and money into making their websites navigable?
The financial challenges facing schools are clear as day. The publishing industry’s customers are changing. But the goodwill of teachers remains key – just look at CGP, which has long nailed the parent purchase model through teacher advocacy.
So why is the industry focusing its lobbying efforts on kicking away a lifeline for teachers, rather than urging the government to invest in schools for the long term?