Matt Hood, Principal, Oak National Academy
Many organisations face ‘a big transition’ at one time or another. As I'm sure many of you know, managing them is notoriously tricky. Acres of management literature is devoted to the subject with much of it focussing on the very different approach needed. We’re often encouraged to put out the old, and bring in the new.
Oak National Academy faces a big transition. So, according to business school dons, what led to our success when we set up in April 2020 isn’t likely to work now.
I’m not convinced. I’ve spent some time thinking about what I need to do differently over the coming months, and of course some things will need to change. But each time I think about it, the more convinced I am that the lessons we learnt back then provide precisely the right building blocks for our future. There are four lessons in particular that stand out.
First, is the importance of a clear goal. In April 2020 we were creating a national online school with free, optional lessons for teachers and their pupils to use during the pandemic. Within a term pupils had taken part in 20m lessons, to date 147m. And even with schools open to all pupils, ~40,000 teachers each week make the most of our materials for lesson planning, curriculum planning, cover, catch up and homework.
We set out the goal on day one (I wrote it in the ‘notes’ section on my phone in a supermarket queue and it’s still there today), it was clearly communicated to everyone working with us and acted as a North Star every time we had a difficult decision or compromise to make.
That phase is behind us now and, as the government announced in March, we are becoming an arms-length body to the Department for Education, with a remit to support teachers to teach, and enable pupils to access, a high-quality curriculum. I’m looking forward to being able to say more about this work soon and why I think CST members will need to be at the heart of it if it’s going to succeed.
Second, we had a team of experts - both in our small core team (around 30 folks) who were coordinating our work and across our partnership of school trusts, schools, subject associations, national centres and commercial partners (well over 400 folks) who were creating the curriculum and associated lessons. Without their curriculum, lessons and teachers we would not be here.
We know that experts use what they know and how that knowledge is organised (their ‘mental model’) within a domain to effectively and efficiently solve the persistent problems they face in their role. In April 2020 this mattered because time was of the essence, quality mattered and we needed to build trust quickly. We had one shot.
Going forward this matters too. Where the pressure has been taken off on pace, it has been replaced with complexity. The task ahead is a hard one, I’m under no illusions about that, and it reaffirms to me the necessity of hiring and developing experts right across the team and wider partnership.
Third was embracing (and trying to manage) a tension between users and the evidence when it came to continuous improvement. On a good day the stars align - what teachers tell you they want sits perfectly alongside where the literature is pointing. But this isn’t the case every day - sometimes those two positions collide. Considering carefully what to do in those situations and embracing rather than running from that tension has been an important part of our success.
As we head into the arms length body we’ll continue to embrace this tension. But I’m also aware there may be concerns about a new one – government policy. No-one, including ministers, want Oak to be diverted by changing political winds, especially if they are contrary to the evidence and teachers’ needs. And so to help us manage the risk of a third tension joining the original two, a series of principles will be at the heart of the founding documents of the arms length body. These principles will ensure that Oak will remain operationally independent of the government and our materials will remain free and totally optional for schools to use as they see fit. Everyone is clear that this independence is critical for the success of the future organisation.
Finally, the importance of generous relationships. As I’ve said before, Oak wouldn’t be here without the generosity of individuals and organisations, across different sectors including education, communications, technology and operations.
And of course the ‘moment’ of the pandemic played its part encouraging all of us to be extraordinarily generous. But I don’t believe it’s all down to that moment. I think our ability as a sector to come together and create Oak was primarily down to the ‘day to day’, ‘run of the mill’, ‘lend a hand’ type generosity that was shown in the years, in some cases decades, before the pandemic hit. When the bat signal went up, it was the relationships that had been built on that generosity that mattered.
And they are going to matter again if our shared work to improve outcomes and equity for our pupils is going to be a success. To invoke the spirit of Leora, they are going to matter if we are going to build a system where school trusts are civic organisations at the heart of their community.
And so the work of helping out begins again. If we can lend a hand, you only need to ask. And you can be reasonably sure that I'm going to be putting up the bat signal in the not so distant future and asking each of you what you might be able to contribute to this shared endeavour as we enter this next stage.
CST CONFERENCE
This Blog is written in association with my workshop at CST Annual Conference 2022.
The CST Blog welcomes perspectives from a diverse range of guest contributors. The opinions expressed in blogs are the views of the author(s), and should not be read as CST guidance or CST’s position.
