A guide on how to use Oak National Academy

A step-by-step guide to getting started


What is Oak?

We’re here to support you to teach, and your pupils’ to access a high-quality curriculum. We provide free access to thousands of adaptable lesson planning and teaching resources and share inspiration, expertise and best-practice advice on curriculum design. 

Our teacher-made, quality assured resources span key stage 1 to 4, and include slide decks, quizzes and worksheets to make your own. And if you’re new to teaching or tackling an unfamiliar topic, our videos give you access to hundreds of experienced teachers delivering lessons, to inspire and support your teaching.


Getting started 

To get started visit our homepage.

Our website is accessible on most devices, including laptops, tablets and mobile and all of our planning and teaching resources are free to use.

We have launched our new website!

We’re starting with the basics and making sure we get those right first. Some features that are available in our Teacher Hub now aren’t in the new area yet. Over time, we’ll introduce more features to support your planning, and to help you manage cover and homework.


Our lesson planning and teaching resources

From our homepage you can search our thousands of resources which have been designed to be easily adapted by you to use in your classroom. 

You can search by keyword or topic or start exploring our subjects by picking a key stage to look through.

Why not get started now with our lesson planning page. You can learn more about our resources and how to use them to support your lesson planning.

Each lesson is made up of similar items:

  • Starter quiz - Help your pupils retrieve or activate prior knowledge with our starter quizzes. Project them in your classroom, or print them off to use in class or as homework.
  • Videos - Build your confidence tackling unfamiliar topics by observing experienced teachers delivering the lesson, or use the videos to support your pupils with homework and revision.
  • Slide decks - The majority of our slide decks can be downloaded and edited. Use them as a foundation for your own lesson plans, and adapt them to make them your own.
  • Worksheets - Our worksheets help your pupils practise key lesson content, and help you plan for questions and tasks. Use them in the classroom, for homework and revision.
  • Exit quiz - Finish your lesson with our exit quizzes, designed to test your pupils’ knowledge recall and to help you to identify areas which require reteaching.
  • Transcripts - These are available for every lesson video. These are useful for those who want to quickly skim to see what each lesson covers, without having to watch the whole video. Many teachers also use Oak lesson transcripts to help with scripting their own lessons.
  • Additional material - For some of our new lessons there is also additional material you can download to help you teach that lesson. Content can include information about the purpose of the lesson, materials needed, methods to use and risk assessment considerations.

Did you know we are updating and improving our resources?

We have started to release new resources for English, maths, history, and science from keys stages 1, 3, 3 & 4, and primary geography and secondary music. More subjects will follow next year.

Our early-release units are now available! We have at least one unit per subject for you to download and try out.

Plus you can now explore our new interactive curriculum plans to make it even easier to plan your lessons this year!

Look out for the label 'New' and for slide decks, worksheets and quizzes that match the colours and logo on our new website. We've improved the design of our resources to be fresher, easier to find and use and to be more accessible.

Get updated when we release even more new teaching resources.


Curriculum plans

Our fully sequenced curriculum plans for each subject provide inspiration and a springboard for annual, termly and weekly planning for every teacher in your school.

Each plan provides a curriculum rationale, an outline of all topic units available and how many lessons are in each. To help you, we’ve provided information on the pre-existing knowledge needed for any unit.  There is also a suggested sequenced order of lessons, if that works for you - but you are of course free to use the units and lessons in any order that suits you.

Explore our new interactive curriculum plans

If you are accessing our new resources for English, maths, history, and science from keys stages 1, 2, 3 & 4, and primary geography and secondary music, you can use our interactive curriculum plans for even more help with your planning. Here you can:

  • See an explainer of each curriculum, so you can understand the thinking, structure and focus behind the plan.
  • View the full sequence, with breakdowns of prior knowledge needed for each unit and what comes next, all in one place.
  • Search a thread within a plan so you can see common themes running through key stages in the subject.

For more information about our new teaching resources see our article How do I use your new resources?


Downloading and sharing resources

Wherever copyright allows, which is on the vast majority of our lessons, you can also download the slides and any worksheets allowing you to edit and adapt them however you need to.

You are also able to share Oak lessons in a variety of ways, either sharing links to the lessons with colleagues or with your classes by copying and pasting a lesson URL link or by posting lessons directly to your VLE by clicking on the ‘share’ button.

Sharing our new resources is not a feature available in our new website at the moment. 

To help recognise our new resources, look out for the label 'New' and for slide decks, worksheets and quizzes that match the colours and logo on our new website. We've improved the design of our resources to be fresher, easier to find and use and to be more accessible.

You can easily customise the lessons, choosing to share them in their entirety or part of a lesson ensuring the learning is personalised and relevant.


Tracking work

To help assess pupils progress, your class can share quiz results with you once they have completed a lesson. This means you can track pupils’ progress even if they’re completing it independently. 

How it works:
  • Pupils complete a quiz before or after a lesson in our Pupil area
  • The quiz is automatically marked and pupils are shown a final score. 
  • The pupils can then share the score directly to Google Classroom or Microsoft Teams, or copy a unique link to email you or upload to your school’s VLE.
  • Teachers are able to see a breakdown of the pupil's answers by question, as well as the final score.
Using the quizzes is a good starting point to show how pupils are progressing and to identify areas where they may need further support.

Tracking work using our new resources is not a feature available in our new website at the moment. 

To help recognise our new resources, look out for the label 'New' and for slide decks, worksheets and quizzes that match the colours and logo on our new website. We've improved the design of our resources to be fresher, easier to find and use and to be more accessible.

 

More ways to use our resources

Our resources are designed to be flexible, so can use them in a variety of ways to support your teaching. Here are some of the other ways we've heard teachers are using Oak.

  • Homework and revision - Teacher workloads are stretched far enough without spending hours creating topical homework, revision booklets and after-school sessions from scratch. For building skills and knowledge outside of the classroom, explore and share our lessons with your classes.
  • Setting cover – Oak is the ace up your sleeve when it comes to setting cover. Our thousands of resources are there to take the pressure off, especially when there’s a requirement for a colleague or supply teacher to cover a subject or key stage that isn’t a specialism. Simply find and select a lesson and share the link.
  • Supporting absent pupils - There are many reasons a pupil may be absent from lessons or from school. Our ready-made resources mean you can support absent pupils and you only have to plan your lessons once, no matter where your pupils are learning. Download resources for your in-class teaching, whilst sending the same lesson to any pupil at home via Google Classroom, Teams or any other platforms. Sending lessons to pupils at home will soon be available in our new resources too!
  • CPD - We've heard from schools that they are using the lessons in staff training as an alternative observation resource or helping new teachers see examples of how other teachers teach a particular topic.  

Our Pupil area

The layout in our Pupil area is much more suited to pupils who might be accessing it at home after you have sent them a link. 

Each lesson builds on the previous one so they can start and then just follow through if that’s what you want them to do and it fits with your topic plans.

The pupil view exactly mirrors the corresponding lesson in our area for teachers. It’s just more functional for the child’s learning needs.


Accessibility

Accessibility is really important to us, so our lessons contain captions which can be switched on and off.

Each lesson is designed to be undertaken by children without detailed support of parents, except for some lessons in the strand for pupils who attend specialist settings who need a little extra help.

Each lesson can be paused and tracked back to give children time to understand and complete tasks. Everything is accessible from the same website. And once they’ve finished a lesson, they can click back to your VLE and finish any other lessons for that day.