Becks Boomer-Clark case study

Lift Firth Park, a mixed secondary school in Sheffield serving a community with high levels of disadvantage, has recently introduced Oak's Spanish curriculum.

Teachers and pupils are already seeing the benefits - from giving pupils a greater confidence to speak Spanish to a more consistent teaching approach across the department.

How Lift Firth Park is building teaching consistency and learner confidence in Spanish with Oak 

With the updated statutory guidance for Relationships, Sex and Health Education (RSHE) coming into effect in September 2026, schools are under increasing pressure to ensure their curriculum is fully compliant, while still meeting the specific needs of their own pupils.

Learning in Harmony Trust, a 13-school trust across London and Southend, is using Oak’s RHE curriculum to bring greater assurance while preserving each school’s autonomy and local context.

How one trust is using Oak to align RSHE curricula across different primary schools and contexts

Wavendon Gate School, a Primary school in Milton Keynes, has seen a remarkable transformation in teaching since adopting the new Oak English curriculum across key stage 1 and key stage 2. Find out how Oak resources have increased pupils’ confidence, reduced teachers’ planning workloading and reignited their creative drive.

Raising ambition and inspiring a love for language with Oak's English curriculum

"Using the Oak resources enables the teachers to really focus on their delivery and bring back their love of teaching and their spark, and that's something that I've been able to see. 

It became really clear that sequential learning is embedded within it, so that gave me a really good starting point and a direction to map out the units across the year for the entire school." 

"The children have really adapted well to the change in curriculum. They like the structure of the lessons. It gives them lots of opportunity, and it allows us to get them into a routine of how the lessons are delivered. 

The vocabulary and the lesson resources that are provided are really high quality, so the children then are speaking with lots of the vocabulary they've been taught." 

"We found that pupils have responded really, really well to using Oak. For example, we focused on just identifying  where you would put the brackets, the commas, and the dashes to identify parenthesis, but next door, dashes are used to add drama, brackets used to add facts. I left all that in for them to use, whereas my class was able to focus on just identifying it, but it was all there in the slides originally. We could just easily choose what we wanted to focus on for each of us." 

"When we had the Director of English from a secondary feeder school come in last term, she said, 'I look at this work, and it looks like the children are excited to write it. How do I get my children to write like this?' My answer was, use Oak." 

"Before I started using Oak, I did have a preconception that, oh, it must have been developed because of COVID. It's brilliant. I feel a little bit cross with myself that I hadn't considered using it before." 

"The best thing about Oak resources is saving you time. As a teacher and as a mum, it's given me my evenings back, which means that I can then put my children to bed, which is really, really important." 

After listening to teacher feedback, Aspire Education Trust adopted Oak for key stage 1 and key stage 2 maths across its schools. Discover how Oak is helping to reduce teacher workload, improve work-life balance, and support high-quality maths teaching and learning at Hollinhey Primary School in Macclesfield.

How Oak's maths curriculum is helping to reduce teachers' planning time by a couple of hours a week

"The motivation around considering Oak came from looking at teacher feedback, really. Workload meant that teachers were spending quite a lot of their time creating resources and things like that." 

"One of the things I want to achieve with using the resources is I want to support the work-life balance of teachers. I want to do what I can to reduce workload because that's really important to me and really important to the staff." 

"I am friends with teachers from other schools and I have screamed from the rooftops about Oak, about how good it is and how much it does reduce your workload. So overall, I would say that Oak saves me a couple of hours a week in planning time." 

"The biggest misconception I've found when working with teachers about when using Oak is they'll say, 'Isn't this what we used in the pandemic?' And it's so not that. It's come a long way in the last five years." 

"What I've found is that the materials are absolutely made for teachers to present. There's lots of engagement from the children." 

"The teachers can go back to enjoying teaching because all the resources are there ready for them." 

"So because we've got that clear sequence curriculum, it gives teachers the confidence that the small steps that they're teaching build on what the children already know and are part of building towards what they need to know in the future." 

"The materials have allowed the flexibility for teachers to always keep the needs of the children at the heart of everything they do, from the planning to the delivery to the assessment. And that's been the main drive in using our Oak National Academy materials." 

"It's a basis on which for you to then sit there as a teacher and go, actually, is this right for my children at this point in time? It's an editable resource. And the reason it's editable is that because that's what you should be doing with it, not just using it as it stands." 

"I look at the slides and I decide which ones I need, which ones I don't need. And I've got that command of it, if you like. It just helps me to sort of be a bit more confident in my delivery of a lesson." 

"The materials are there for us now, so on the whole, it's saved our Sundays."

Tens of thousands of teachers have trusted Oak’s AI to support their lesson planning. Discover how teachers and leaders at Frome Vale Academy in Bristol are using Oak’s AI to overcome the challenge of getting started with lesson planning, planning with fidelity to the curriculum, and tailoring resources to meet the needs of their pupils.

Giving teachers a starting point with safe, curriculum-aligned AI tools

"Hey, there. Welcome to school. Let's go and have a look around. So I'm finding using the AI tools from Oak really useful as a teacher." 

Use Oak's AI tools including Aila, Oak's AI lesson assistant, to create:

"I've been using it quite a lot for some of the planning for things like history and geography, where I've been using it to find ideas for sequences of lessons." 

"First of all, I think it's important to address workload. We know, and we've been exploring that using tools like Aila are effective in helping us think and plan about what we're delivering in a lesson. 

The content I've seen coming through in the lesson designs and in the lessons I've seen, there's integrity to the curriculum and fidelity to the curriculum, which is really important obviously to us."

"As well as I think tailoring some of the resources to our particular demographics."

"Let's get started. So how have you been getting on with using the AI tool?"

"It kind of solves that blank-page syndrome where you've got to plan a sequence of lessons or a lesson itself, and you might not know the best way in, best way to start. These AI tools get you over that initial hurdle and get you going.  And even if it does sort of 80, 90% and you've got to finish it off, I think that frees up a little bit of extra time to kind of catch people in the staff room, get a cup of tea, and get out of here in the afternoon just a little bit earlier."

"Being able to wind down, that teachers really need to be the best person they can be in the classroom."

"I think the main thing is that it is really easy to use. It's safe, it's reliable, and it produces content that is ready to use with only a few tweaks. I haven't seen anything that's out there that does the job half as well."

"And it really adheres and aligns to the work we've done on teachers being even more confident and secure about the pedagogy, understanding about the key components of lessons and the effectiveness of the way to deliver those lessons. And I think they've been excited to learn professionally along with a trusted tool to be able to do that. 

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