Pupils working on electronics in a D&T project

Design and technology helps pupils make sense of the world. Oak’s free, adaptable D&T curriculum, developed with Design and Technology Association experts, supports high-quality teaching from a strong, flexible starting point.

Help pupils become confident designers with Oak’s adaptable D&T curriculum

From full curriculum plans for every subject (KS1-4) to expert guidance on upcoming national curriculum changes, Oak gives schools the support they need today - and the confidence to prepare for tomorrow.

Gaps? Not Anymore. We offer full curriculum support 

Pupils raising their hands in class while a teacher is standing up teaching at the front of the classroom.

Learn about Oak’s newly released, free, fully resourced national curriculum model, the latest ImpactEd evidence of its impact in schools, and how major MATs are adopting Oak to strengthen teaching, consistency and workload support.

A new chapter: Oak’s fully updated classroom curriculum is now live – free for every school and teacher

A primary school teacher is standing in front of a whiteboard that reads 'speech first: inverted commas and punctuation rules. English, Oak National Academy', teaching a class of primary school children sitting on the floor. 

Read ImpactEd's latest independent evaluation of how Oak National Academy is helping teachers to improve pupil outcomes and close the disadvantage gap by supporting teachers to teach and enabling pupils to access a high-quality curriculum. 

Five key insights from our 24/25 Impact Report

Oak will be reimagining its reception curriculum and resources with early years experts to create optional, adaptable, evidence-informed materials that reflect how young children learn and support teachers in today’s classrooms.

Reimagining Oak’s reception resources for today’s classrooms

Primary school pupils in a lesson with their hands up to answer questions

Oak’s free, adaptable RE curriculum helps pupils explore diverse worldviews through authentic case studies, enquiry-led learning and critical thinking – building understanding while saving teachers valuable planning time.

Spark deeper thinking and bring diverse worldviews to life through RE  

Secondary pupils working together discussing a group task

Help pupils become confident, creative communicators with Oak’s French, Spanish and German curriculum. Designed by experts, our adaptable resources build vocabulary, grammar and cultural understanding over time – supporting teachers to deliver engaging, inclusive language lessons from key stage 2-4.

Teach languages that connect people, cultures and ideas

Now that the plans to revise the national curriculum and update GCSEs have been announced, it’s natural to have questions. What’s changing? How does this impact my subject(s)? And, most importantly, how can I get ready for the changes?

Here are your top questions answered to help you prepare with confidence. 


National curriculum changes are coming. Here are your top questions answered.

Think Oak only covers a few subjects? Think again. Explore free, expert-made curriculum plans and classroom resources for every subject, KS1-4. 

Think Oak only covers a few subjects? Think again

A teacher interacting with two pupils using laptops

Citizenship is at the heart of helping young people understand their place in society and the power they hold to shape it. With Oak’s brand new citizenship curriculum and lesson resources, you can save hours of planning time each week. 

Teach active citizenship and inspire your pupils

Two pupils completing a worksheet together

Oak’s free maths curriculum and lesson resources, developed with subject experts MEI, spans years 1–11 and is rooted in mastery principles. Fully sequenced and expertly designed, it supports teachers to balance conceptual understanding with exam readiness – saving hours of planning without compromising on quality or coherence.

A maths curriculum that connects every stage

A deputy headteacher holding a filming clapperboard

Great English teaching helps pupils find their voice - as readers, writers and speakers. That’s why our complete English curriculum for key stages 1 to 4 is designed to build confident communicators from the very start of school life through to GCSEs. 

How a school is transforming English teaching with Oak’s curriculum

Discover free curriculum plans, classroom resources and AI tools to save you time and spark inspiration across every subject.

You don’t need an emergency for Oak. All you need is a classroom

Secondary pupils painting in an art lesson

Oak’s new art and design curriculum offers diverse artist references across times and styles. It provides inspiring examples to spark pupil's creativity and support teachers with a broader range of artists, while respecting permissions.

Art and design at Oak: Our approach to imagery and references

A teacher showing a student on a computer how to do something

Technology shapes every aspect of life, and computing education must go beyond coding. Oak’s new curriculum, developed with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, offers free, adaptable lessons to help pupils think critically, act responsibly, and connect learning to the real world.



Teaching computing that matters

Pupils, wearing aprons over their uniforms, prepare vegetables while standing at a unit in a food technology classroom.

Food is more than fuel: it’s culture, creativity and community. Oak’s new cooking and nutrition curriculum, with free adaptable resources for key stages 1-3, helps pupils explore these connections and build essential life skills.


Transform food education for your pupils

A summary of what Oak National Academy has learned about AI safety guardrails in education since launching Aila, our free AI lesson assistant. 


Building AI that’s safe for the classroom: what we have learned with Aila

Screenshot previews of new teaching resources from online safety units, including a printable exit quiz, worksheet, and lesson slides.

From toxic algorithms to online misogyny, young people are facing growing dangers online - and teachers are on the front line. Oak’s new online safety lesson resources are here to help you teach online safety in schools, with confidence and clarity.

Teaching online safety in schools: tackling real risks to help pupils stay safe

How are you using and adapting Oak’s free teaching resources in your classroom? Here’s an example of how one Academy used our computing resources as inspiration to set up a hackathon, allowing pupils to tackle real-world problems, sharpen their programming skills, and work creatively.

Bring your pupils’ computing skills to life by hosting your own hackathon

How can you be confident that AI tools are safe and suitable for use in education? The Department for Education now has AI product safety expectations, which set out clear technical safeguarding expectations for any generative AI product in education. 

We contributed to shaping this framework, and we’re proud that Aila, our AI lesson assistant, not only meets but exceeds these safety expectations. Find out how.


Looking for an AI tool you can trust for use in education? How Aila meets and exceeds the DfE’s safety expectations for teacher-facing AI tools

Find out more about our brand new financial education and real-world maths lessons designed to help pupils – and support teachers – as they learn about money and develop financial skills to manage money sensibly, both on and offline. 

Helping pupils get smart about financial education and online spending – new lesson resources for primary and secondary teachers

A summary of the top questions teachers are asking about Aila, our AI lesson assistant, including if the tool is free and how you can use it to adapt lessons for SEND and EAL pupils.

Your top 5 questions about Aila, our AI lesson assistant, answered.

Read about the impact Aila has had on lesson planning practices, workload reductions and expertise development in its first few months.

How is Aila impacting teacher lesson planning practices, workload and expertise? Early insights from the classroom

Wondering just how adaptable our resources are? Find out how a Trust Strategic Maths Lead is drawing on our curriculum and resources to design their own.

How an academy trust is building a maths curriculum using Oak

Teacher delivering lesson in a classroom of primary pupils

Read the independent evaluation report for Oak's impact on teaching in 2023/24, a year when we released new adaptable resources for 6,000+ lessons, launched innovative AI tools, and made all content Open Government Licensed.

Our impact on teachers and pupils in 2023/24

We're taking the need for accuracy, safety and pedagogical rigour really seriously with Aila, our AI lesson assistant. Today our paper, Auto-Evaluation: A Critical Measure in Driving Improvements in Quality and Safety of AI-Generated Lesson Resources has been published by MIT Open Learning. This milestone highlights our work to ensure AI-generated lesson content not only reduces teacher workload but also drives the highest quality standards.

How do we ensure our AI-generated resources are high-quality?

We've worked with the British Nutrition Foundation to create cooking and nutrition lessons for Years 7 to 9. In this blog, you can find out about our secondary cooking and nutrition curriculum and what you can expect to see within it. 

Using our cooking and nutrition resources in the secondary classroom

A pupil wearing an apron over their uniform, transferring pastry on to a plate

We're thrilled to be working with the British Nutrition Foundation to create food lessons for Years 1 to 6. Here you can find out more about the content of our primary cooking and nutrition curriculum as well as a handy checklist to help you prepare for your lessons.  

Using our cooking and nutrition resources in the primary classroom

How does Aila, our AI lesson assistant, work? Find out how Aila generates high-quality lessons using AI techniques such as prompt engineering and retrieval augmented generation. 

Understanding the ‘Ai’ in Aila

Use our quick guide to see how our new primary maths curriculum supports the use of the NCETM Curriculum Prioritisation materials.


Supporting the use of NCETM Curriculum Prioritisation materials

Whether you are creating bespoke resources or tailoring content, AI has the potential to help speed things along and ease your workload - but how can you get started? Join our webinars to find out more about Aila, our free AI lesson assistant, and how it could help you.


Interested in using AI in your planning? Join our webinars

Are you an EYFS,  key stage 1 or key stage 2 teacher thinking about how you approach the teaching of Remembrance Day this year? Here are some ideas to consider from our history subject lead, Benjie Groom.

Lesson planning ideas for teaching Remembrance Day

Looking for examples of high-quality curricula to help you plan your own? From art to sports, coding to food and nutrition, find about our new curriculum plans and see how they can help inspire your planning. 

Our new curriculum plans are here

A photo of a teacher engaging in conversation with two pupils at their desks

Teachers are dedicating increasing time to make sure they can support pupils with SEND - this blog explores the challenges they face and how Oak can help.

Supporting pupils with SEND? How Oak can help

Ensuring pedagogical integrity has been a priority when creating our new AI lesson planning assistant, Aila. Find out why we built Aila, the research we used to inform its design and how we have improved the quality of the content that Aila produces in this blog. 

The pedagogical thinking behind Aila, our AI lesson planning tool

Read about Aila, our new AI-powered lesson assistant, that you can use to build tailor-made lesson plans and resources in minutes


Introducing Aila, our AI-powered lesson assistant

Curious about using AI for lesson planning? Discover 8 things our lesson planning tool for teachers can do.

8 things you won’t believe our AI lesson planning tool can do

Are you an education innovator, creating products to help teachers and pupils? Do you want first access to Oak’s open-sourced content?  

You’re invited to Oak National Academy’s Hackathon. An open invitation to experiment with our open-source content to create high-impact, exciting ed-tech products that enhance teaching and learning. 



You're invited to our hackathon

AI-driven assistants, such as Aila, offer many benefits, but it’s crucial that we have a set of protections in place for using them. In this blog we share an overview of the protections we have put in place to ensure safe lesson creation.  

Aila’s safety guardrails explained

Find out how long it should be taking you to plan a lesson, along with tips from our experts!

How long does it take to plan a lesson?

Find out how to teach topics that might be challenging for you or your pupils - and what you can do to overcome this!

How to plan to teach difficult topics

How do you support your pupils with common misconceptions before they become embedded? Find out how to capture misconceptions and provide best-practice in the classroom.

How to address common misconceptions in lessons

Get confident with lesson objectives with our lesson objective examples.

Lesson objective examples

Find out how to create your own lesson plan template and how they can help your thinking process.

How to create your own lesson plan template

Find out how to create effective lesson objectives for your classes!

Creating your lesson objectives

Want to know the difference between 'learning objectives', 'lesson objectives' and 'lesson outcomes'? Find out more now. 

What are learning objectives?

Our new curriculum plans are now available! We've got your questions covered in this blog. 

New curricula: what you need to know

Ready to start planning lessons? Follow our simple steps to get started today.

How to plan a lesson: simple steps

We are developing a new secondary citizenship curriculum and teaching resources. Find out who we are partnering with and more about their work here. 

Introducing our citizenship curriculum partner

Find out more about our relationships & health education and RSHE curriculum partner and our collaboration to develop primary and secondary curriculum plans and teaching resources. 

Introducing our Relationships & Health Education and RSHE curriculum partner

We will be developing a new primary languages curriculum and secondary MFL curriculum in collaboration with our curriculum partner. Find out who they are in this blog. 

Introducing our languages and MFL curriculum partner

In this blog we introduce you to our primary and secondary RE curriculum partners and tell you about the work we will be doing with them over the coming months. 

Introducing our RE curriculum partners

We are delighted to announce our primary and secondary PE curriculum partner. Here you can find out more about them and the work we will be doing with them. 

Introducing our PE curriculum partners

Here we introduce our new primary and secondary D&T curriculum partner and explore how we will be working with them

Introducing our design & technology curriculum partner

Find out who our new curriculum partners are for KS3 and KS4 geography and how they will be working with us. 



Introducing our secondary geography curriculum partners 

Here you’ll find an introduction to our new art and design curriculum partner and the work they will be doing in the year ahead



Introducing our art and design curriculum partner

Find out about our new computing curriculum partner who we will be collaborating with on primary and secondary curricula and resources. 



Introducing our computing curriculum partner

In October, we launched an open procurement process to find our newest curriculum partners. Find out who they are and how they will be shaping Oak's curriculum in this blog.

Introducing our new curriculum partners

Here we introduce our new primary music curriculum partners. Read more about their expertise and the curriculum principles they will be following. 

Introducing our primary music curriculum partners

As well as sharing our curricula, we have started to develop plans to signpost additional curriculum sequences from Oak’s online products. We would like to hear from teachers, schools and providers to help inform our approach to sharing additional curricula. 

Give your feedback on how Oak could signpost curricula

Find out more about how you can apply to join one of our subject expert groups to share your expertise and help shape our new curricula and resources 

Share your subject expertise in our expert groups to help shape our new curricula and resources

Bennie Kara, a speaker, trainer and consultant on the curriculum, discusses the importance of creating diverse and inclusive curricula and her experience of working with Oak. 

Diversity in the Oak curriculum 

Having launched new, experimental AI tools for quizzes and lesson planning, we now want to help schools develop their own AI projects.

Our new AI tools for teachers are just the start

Our Chief Executive Matt Hood reflects on our new curricula and the limitations and benefits it will have for teachers.

What our new curriculum is, and what it isn't

We share findings for our latest evaluation about the impact Oak has on teachers.

What impact did Oak have in 2022/23?

Submit your bid to work with us to create brand new curriculum sequences and teaching resources

Launched: open procurement for new curricula and resources

Careful task design is vital to the successful delivery of any maths curriculum. Here we share our approach.

Task design within our maths curriculum 

Find out about the considerations made when planning our new music curriculum to help you when creating yours. 

Musical conversations and curriculum considerations

Need to design a subject curriculum but not sure where to start? Our 7 easy steps curriculum design guide is the perfect free guide for any teacher.

How to design a subject curriculum in 7 easy steps

Does your curriculum need a refresh? Watch our short video on making changes using our resources and start planning using our free quick guide. 

How to refresh your curriculum using Oak resources

Want inspiration to help you design a unit of study? Our handy guide and quick six minute video tutorial take you through the steps we follow.

How to create a unit of study

We explore our maths subject expert group members' thoughts on our curriculum explainer statements, curriculum threads and sequencing. 

Collaborating with our maths expert group 

We have now met with our music expert group for feedback on our new curricula twice. Here we explore their thoughts on our curriculum explainer statements, curriculum threads and sequencing. 

Collaborating with our music expert group 

We sought feedback from our history expert group on our new curriculum explainer statements and sequencing. Find out what they said. 

Collaborating with our history expert group 

Learn about our subject expert group's feedback on the explainer statements, curriculum threads and sequencing of our new English curriculum. 

Collaborating with our English expert group 

Here we explore feedback we gathered on the curriculum explainer statements, curriculum threads and sequencing for our new science curriculum. 

Collaborating with our science expert group 

We explore our geography expert group's feedback on our new curriculum.

Collaborating with our geography expert group 

Find out how Oak can help you on your ITT and ECT training years!

We can help on your teacher training year

Find out how our new primary geography curriculum will explore your local context. 

Teaching local geography in the primary phase 

How do we choose what to teach in English? It is the maddening, exciting, and challenging question that preoccupies anyone lucky enough to be tasked with making curriculum decisions in English. In this blog, we talk about the considerations made around our new primary and secondary curricula. 

Selecting texts to teach in English 

Find out how we've been shaping our NEW history curriculum, and some of the thinking behind curriculum challenges. 

How do we plan a history curriculum?

We are growing our community of partners and are now looking to share information with potential new curriculum partners ahead of an open procurement process in the new academic year covering a wide range of subjects. 

New opportunities to create resources for Oak

Get ready for teaching in September with our top tips for stepping into a new school or starting your teacher training!

Preparing to teach for September

Find out how we are developing our brand new science curricula through a 'big questions' approach. 

Exploring ‘big ideas’ through ‘big questions’ in science

Hear from teachers themselves about their hacks for speeding up and improving their lesson planning using Oak.

Rethink how you can use Oak this year

Open innovation: Licensing and access to Oak's new resources

Open innovation: Licensing and access to our new resources

Find out how to adapt and scaffold any lesson to support your pupils.

10 ways to scaffold your lessons, according to our experts

Read about updates for our 2022-2025 strategy, and how we're continuing to shape the future of Oak.

Our strategy update

Help pupils to understand the coronation and royal events with these easy-to-implement lesson ideas.

Using the coronation to teach about monarchy

We share our approach to incorporating concepts like 'monarchy' into the curriculum in a coherent and sequenced way. 

How to plan lessons and your curriculum that teach pupils about monarchy

Help your pupils to revise by reading our top tips!

6 tips and techniques to help pupils revise for GCSEs and other assessments

Find out how to motivate your pupils when starting a new topic.

Three ways to motivate pupils' learning and hook them into a new topic

Read about how our NEW curriculum partners and subject experts and shaping Oak's curriculum.

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Inspiration for inside and outside the classroom

Categories

Help pupils become confident designers with Oak’s adaptable D&T curriculum

Gaps? Not Anymore. We offer full curriculum support

A new chapter: Oak’s fully updated classroom curriculum is now live – free for every school and teacher

Five key insights from our 24/25 Impact Report