Oak National Academy was created in 2020 as a rapid response to the Covid-19 outbreak and brought together a range of partners and teachers to create resources for remote learning. Over the last 2.5 years, more than 150 million lessons have been delivered through their online platform and over 500 teachers have contributed to their thousands of resources. 

ImpactEd Evaluation started working with Oak National Academy at its very early stages to develop their organisational Theory of Change. Since then, ImpactEd Evaluation has worked with Oak National Academy on an annual basis to evaluate their platform and resources, with a focus on improving quality and understanding the overall impact of learning through Oak. 

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Measuring the impact of Oak’s resources 

ImpactEd Evaluation ran two mixed-method evaluations in Spring and Summer of 2020/21 and again in 2021/22. Both evaluations included:

• A large-scale teacher survey to understand the impact of Oak National Academy, comparing the results to teachers who did not use their resources. 
• A number of focus groups and interviews to delve into experiences of teachers in more depth and understand implementation in more detail.

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Sharing the findings

Oak National Academy have shared their impact reports with the sector, so that others can read about the impact of their resources. The key findings and areas of improvement from each report have fed into their product improvement processes. Their latest report (Summer 2022) shows that: 

• The main use cases of Oak have changed significantly since 2020/21, with an increasing focus on the use of Oak for curriculum and lesson planning, as well as delivery in the classroom. This is different to 2020/21, where Oak was more frequently used for ‘emergency’ use, such as setting cover lessons and work for absent pupils. 
• Oak saves time for a large proportion of its users and users tend to be more positive about their workload than non-users.
• Oak users had a statistically significant higher wellbeing score than both non-Oak users and the national benchmark.

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Reka Budai, Research and Evaluation Manager

“It has been invaluable to partner with ImpactEd Evaluation over the past two years. They brought a great wealth of knowledge and education expertise, and guided us to find the right approach to measuring our impact. Their findings reassured us that we are heading in the right direction, and they pushed us to improve our evaluation approach each year”

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