Oak Academy curriculum partners for 8 new subjects revealed

Oak National Academy has named new curriculum partners who successfully bid for a slice of £7 million to help create free lesson materials for eight more subjects.

The government quango’s 14 new partners will create resources covering art and design, citizenship, computing, design and technology, modern foreign languages, PE, religious education and RSHE.

Contracts have also been awarded for primary music and secondary geography, after  no supplier previously met its quality standards for these phases in its first procurement round.

Three of these were won by schools, with Ormiston Academies Trust selected for secondary RE and The Cam Academy Trust picked to develop MFL resources.

Cathedral Schools Trust partnered with Bristol Beacon, a music charity, to deliver primary music. 

Most of the other lots went to an array of subject associations (See full list below).

Oak said its new partners will help create 6,000 resources, with teachers and subject experts from across the sector set to provide “independent feedback”.

Curriculum sequences and the first units in these subjects will be available via Oak from the autumn term of 2024, rolling out across the year, the quango said. 

The full curriculum packages will be released by autumn 2025. 

Winners of the first £8.2 million round, covering six subjects, were announced in March last year. 

The quango said about half of these resources are already published and will continue to be released throughout this school year.

Matt Hood, chief executive of Oak National Academy, said they are “drawing on every part of the education sector in this collaboration, meaning teachers will have access to some of the best curriculum thinking and resource design available”.

Full list of cycle two curriculum partners:

Primary

●        Art & Design – National Society for Education in Art and Design (NSEAD)

●        Computing  – Raspberry Pi Foundation

●        Design & Technology – Design and Technology Association, British Nutrition Foundation

●        PE – PE Scholar

●        RE – Pennine Learning Associates

●        Modern foreign languages (French and Spanish KS2) – The Cam Academy Trust

●        Music – Bristol Beacon and Cathedral Schools Trust

●        Relationships and Health Education – Life Lessons

Secondary

●        Art & Design – National Society for Education in Art and Design (NSEAD)

●        Citizenship – Association for Citizenship Teaching (ACT)

●        Computing  – Raspberry Pi Foundation

●        Design & Technology – Design and Technology Association, British Nutrition Foundation

●        Geography – Geographical Association (KS3) Geography South West (KS4)

●        Modern foreign languages (French, Spanish & German) – The Cam Academy Trust

●        PE – PE Scholar

●        RE – Ormiston Academies Trust

●  RSHE – Life Lessons