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