A step-by-step guide to getting started
Welcome to Oak. This guide gives you more information on:
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.
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.
Read more about using our new resources in Your guide to using our new resources.
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.
- Audio and video clips - Some subjects such as languages and MFL, music and PE have video and/or audio clips to enhance explanations, your own understanding and to create a richer learning experience in the classroom. See our help article: What are video and audio clips?
- 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.
We're updating and improving our resources
We've released new lesson planning and teaching resources for English, maths, history, and science from keys stages 1, 3, 3 & 4, and primary geography.
Look our 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.
For our other subjects, we’re releasing those resources on a rolling basis over this academic year, as soon as they’re ready. By autumn 2025, you’ll have access to every resource for all our curriculum plans. You can keep up to date by signing up for updates from us.
You can also explore our interactive curriculum plans to make it even easier to plan your lessons this year!
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 further, we’ve provided unit information on 'why this, why now'. 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.
Read more about our curriculum plans in A guide to our new curricula.
Explore our new interactive curriculum plans
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 to inspire your own approach
- View the full sequence and lessons we'll release teaching resources for later this academic year
- See the unit descriptions with a 'why this, why now' to help you consider the sequence of your current planning
- Download the plan to use offline to help with your planning.
For more information about our new teaching resources see our help article: How do I use your new resources?
Downloading full units
You can now save yourself time by downloading all lessons in a unit sequence to use now or come back to later.
You'll see a Download unit button on any unit page of our teaching resources:
You'll be asked a few questions about what you use our resources for and then you'll be able to log in to download whole units of resources.
For more information read our help article about downloading full units.
Logging in will also give you access to Aila, our AI lesson assistant.
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.
Add teacher notes and share
Sharing teaching resources with your colleagues just got easier. You can now share our lesson resources with your own personalised comments, in one place.
Click 'Add teacher note and share' and add a note that will be displayed when the copied link is opened.
For example, you could add:
- Instructions for the lesson to send to a cover teacher.
- Tips for your colleagues who are planning similar lessons.
- Lesson reflections for those supporting your development.
Share activities with pupils
Click on the 'Share activities with pupils' button and choose:
- 'Copy link' to share directly with colleagues or with your classes
- 'Google Classroom' or 'Microsoft Teams' to post lessons directly to your VLE
- 'Email' to open up an email to send directly from your email account.
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 their 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 lesson in our pupil area.
- The quizzes are automatically marked and pupils are shown a final score.
- Pupils can then share results via a link or print them out.
- Teachers are able to see a breakdown of the pupil's answers by question, attempts made, the final score, whether they downloaded the worksheet and how much of the video they watched.
Read more in Using our improved pupil area.
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.
Read more in Using our improved pupil area.
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.
What we're working on next
We've announced our new curriculum partners for even more subjects and we've worked with them, our expert groups and hundreds of teachers to produce new curriculum plans for:
- primary and seconday art & design
- secondary citizenship
- primary and secondary computing
- primary and KS3 cooking and nutrition
- primary and secondary design and technology
- KS2 and secondary French
- secondary geography
- secondary German
- primary music
- primary and secondary physical education (PE)
- primary and secondary religious education (RE)
- KS2 and secondary Spanish
We’re releasing the new resources for these subjects on a rolling basis over this academic year, as soon as they’re ready. By autumn 2025, you’ll have access to everything we’re releasing.
Sign up now so we can update you when new resources are released and share other helpful content by email.