How Oak's maths curriculum is helping to reduce teachers' planning time by a couple of hours a week
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.
(Soft music)
"Do I just say anything?"
"Do I need to do the clack?"
"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."
