How research with teachers shapes Oak

Teachers use Oak in different ways. A curriculum leader may be reviewing a whole subject. A teacher new to a topic may want a complete sequence of lessons. Someone else may need one resource to fill a gap in their existing plans.

User research helps us understand those differences before we decide what to build or improve. It also helps us test things in real life, from finding the right lesson on our website to using it in the classroom.

Since Oak launched, we've surveyed thousands of teachers and run in-depth interviews with more than 600. This gives us a broad view of teachers' needs, while those individual conversations help us understand the why behind the numbers.

Why user research matters

Our education team consists of specialist teachers who bring their expertise and make sure our lessons are grounded in the latest evidence on teaching and learning.

However, even the highest-quality lessons won't be effective if they're hard to find on the website or difficult to use in the classroom. That's why we complement existing research with continuous teacher feedback, ensuring our products work in practice. In this blog, we outline three research practices and share examples of how research has improved our products.

Exploring problems and evaluating solutions

We conduct research throughout the design process. Discovery research helps us explore users' needs and challenges. We use those findings to design solutions, then carry out evaluative research to gather user feedback on the proposed solutions. Using both approaches helps us understand the problem and whether a proposed solution works.

Each year, we also commission an independent evaluation to better understand our impact on pupils, teachers, and the broader ecosystem. This allows us to monitor our progress towards achieving our intended impact and identify areas for improvement.

As an example of exploratory research, teachers told us through surveys that finding the right lesson could be easier. In one month, we explored where they got stuck on their journey through our website. The following month, we ran an evaluative study testing a prototype shaped by the changes suggested in the initial sessions. It included changes such as making curriculum maps easier to find. We then refined it further in response to teacher feedback.

Choosing the right method for the question

We choose from a range of research methods depending on the question we need to answer. These include quantitative methods, such as surveys and A/B tests, and qualitative methods, such as interviews, usability testing and user feedback submitted via our website. Alongside our primary research, we draw on findings from academic research and other education organisations.

Following our discovery and evaluative research on the navigation prototypes, we chose unmoderated testing to further test this solution. Participants completed tasks independently, without a researcher present. This allowed us to gather more behavioural feedback in a setting closer to how people would use the website themselves.

Most participants successfully navigated the proposed website structure to find relevant pages and resources, resulting in an ‘excellent’ System Usability Scale score of 80.7 out of 100 for the prototypes.

Listening to teachers and observing real classrooms

Improving the website's usability is only one part of the Oak experience. The most important part comes next: teachers using the resources with pupils in the classroom. That’s why we also observe how resources are used in practice, including different classroom contexts and constraints schools face — something online interviews can't fully capture.

Over the past two years, user research has played a vital role in designing our lesson structure to create over 10,000 lessons. We conducted six rounds of prototype lesson testing in schools. Teachers trialled early concepts and shared feedback after each round, allowing us to refine the lesson designs between each research round before they entered large-scale production.

These tests revealed valuable insights that online research could have missed. Some examples included the need for PE lesson resources to withstand unpredictable weather and for non-specialist teachers to have lessons that supported them in delivering sensitive relationships, sex and health education (RSHE) topics with confidence. They also showed that printed worksheet paper quality will not work for an art lesson on painting.

Help shape what we build

In summary, user research helps us understand teachers' needs. It helps us move beyond assumptions and keep our website and resources grounded in how teachers plan and teach in practice, plus the real challenges they face.

Want to contribute? Join our teacher research panel to hear about Oak research projects matched to your interests and help shape our website and resources. Find out how to take part on our Research page.