S15 E5: The One About Oak National Academy

In 2020 while the world went on lockdown, something incredible emerged to support us teaching remotely - Oak National Academy.  Teachers from all over the country created online lessons along with videos which students could watch, pause, re-watch and learn.  These were lessons created by teachers for teachers for all Key Stages for all subjects.  When the world went back to normal, Oak National continued and teachers realised how perfect these lessons were for cover, CPD and revision.  Five years later, Oak National is going from strength to strength; aiming to have an all through curriculum based on the latest educational research which can support teachers everyday. 

Adam Robertson has been leading the team to develop the Oak Curriculum for RE and together they have created a worldclass, worldview curriculum which is my go to for cover and CPD for Teacher With Other Specialisms.  I have also been priviledged to be part of the team developing these lessons and I know how merticuluously they are planned to ensure they are fit for purpose in the 21st Century.  In this episode Adam joins me for a behind the scenes look at how Oak works.

https://www.thenational.academy/teachers/curriculum/religious-education-secondary-aqa/units

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:05

Welcome to the RE Podcast, the first dedicated RE podcast for students and teachers. My name is Louisa Jane Smith, and this is the RE Podcast. The podcast for those of you who think RE is boring, which it is, and I'll prove it to you. Now, during lockdown, many of us used or watched our own children use lessons from Oak National Academy. Five years later, they are still my go-to cover lessons or CPD for teachers with other specialisms because I know they are reliably good and accurate and created by experts. But what is Oak and where exactly did it come from? To answer all these questions and more, I have invited Adam Robertson onto the podcast from Oak National Academy. So welcome, Adam.

SPEAKER_01: 0:46

Lovely to be here, Lou. Thank you very much for the invitation. It's alright.

SPEAKER_00: 0:49

No, I was trying to remember the first time you met. So you were my mentor in the first year of the Cullum St. Gabriel leadership course, but we kind of knew of each other before that. But I think it's just through some social media and the podcast, I think.

SPEAKER_01: 1:00

I think probably, yeah. I think a lot of things start that way, don't they? And then yeah, I was very honoured to be your mentor, Lou. And I don't think I had to contribute very much, but uh it's been great to see how your kind of career's developed ever since.

SPEAKER_00: 1:11

I mean, Adam, you are one of the most encouraging people I've ever met, and I was absolutely honoured to have you as my mentor for a year. So I think it was mutually brilliant and a really great experience. So thank you. But now you're working for Oak, but just explain what your actual role is.

SPEAKER_01: 1:29

Okay, so I'm the subject leader for religious education, which means that my current role at the moment is to kind of project manage all the resources that we're putting together for Key Stage 1, 2, 3, and 4 for RE.

SPEAKER_00: 1:43

It's not an easy job, I can't imagine. But it must be so wonderful to be working with so many incredible teachers from around the country that are sort of like working on this project.

SPEAKER_01: 1:54

Yeah, definitely. I mean, it's an honour and a privilege, really, and I feel quite humbled to have have the role in the first place and to work with such an amazing team to do this, because I believe that this will hopefully be a really great service to the RE community and to teachers all over the country. And I really hope that the resources we're producing now, these new resources, are going to really help teachers in a real range of schools with a range of subject knowledge and specialisms. And that's what I'm doing it for, really, is just because we know this is a subject where there's a lot of fear and misconceptions and worries about teaching it, and anything we can do to give teachers materials that will help them and encourage them to teach, that's what we're here for, really.

SPEAKER_00: 2:38

Brilliant. Let's go back right to the beginning because sort of oak emerged in the middle of lockdown, and I think people were sort of just trying to deal with life day to day. And so actually, I don't think everybody really understands where this started and why this started. So you're able to sort of take us back to that infancy.

SPEAKER_01: 2:56

Yeah, I mean, I could do my best. Obviously, it's not I wasn't working for Oak at that point, but you're quite right. I mean, Oak was the brainchild of Matt Hood, the uh CEO who's just left amongst a great group of people, and their aim was in the pandemic to provide basically an online school, lessons across lots of different subjects for teachers and pupils to use. I myself was in the primary classroom at that point, and I remember directing pupils to use them. So that's where Oak began, and it was obviously hugely, hugely successful, and produce amazing materials at a time when there was a great national need for them, and I think lots of teachers will remember that. I think now, over the last couple of years, that the mission of Oak has changed and really it's about supporting teaching in the classroom. It is there as a backstop if it's needed for remote learning, but more than that, it's really about trying to reduce workload for teachers and improve pupil outcomes by producing high-quality resources that can be used and adapted in the classroom now.

SPEAKER_00: 3:56

And I think later on in the chat we're going to spotlight a little bit more what actually is on offer and what does that include. So that's a little bit about the history. What is its purpose, do you feel? What's the purpose of Oak?

SPEAKER_01: 4:08

So fundamentally, the purpose of Oak is to, it's all about reducing the disadvantage gap and it's about trying to equip teachers by reducing their workload. We know teachers spend a huge amount of time planning lessons, creating materials, and we know that that's kind of being replicated in schools across the country, and that that's quite an onerous task, it's quite a complex task, particularly if, like me, you come from a primary background where you're not necessarily a specialist. And so Oak there is really to produce resources which teachers can then use and build on. And they're kind of underpinned by our principles, which is very much about knowledge and vocabulary-rich resources, but they're also resources that are designed to be flexible from setting to setting, and they aim to kind of showcase the diversity in all of the subjects that we're producing, and we'll talk about how we're doing that in RE later, and that are also accessible for children for a range of needs as well.

SPEAKER_00: 5:00

And I think that's really lovely that actually we are aware that there is great variations in the quality of teaching across the nation, and that also there is an attainment gap between people from certain backgrounds and other backgrounds. And actually, it's really lovely that sitting behind this curriculum are those values to address those two quite huge issues. And I think that's a really, really lovely way to approach curriculum design. Let's talk a little bit more then about the actual curriculum. So just talk about what you're offering and the rationale behind the decisions that you made.

SPEAKER_01: 5:35

So we're offering, in terms of specifically RE here, because this is our conversation, isn't it? We're offering curriculum resources from year one up to key stage four to GCSE. So we're not offering materials in early years, and that's kind of deliberate because we know that that's a different sort of setting and a different sort of pedagogy, but we are offering materials for primary schools, and in terms of our secondary, we're offering materials for key stage three, and also we're exemplifying parts of the spec for AQA, EDUCAS, and EdXL. And the decisions we've taken at examination level is to focus on kind of the most used. So we're looking at Christianity and Islam and Buddhism across those specs and the theme papers as well.

SPEAKER_00: 6:22

And how have you kind of constructed that curriculum? How have you selected what units to teach in each year?

SPEAKER_01: 6:29

Yeah, and that's a really great question, Lou, and obviously one of the biggest questions, particularly when we look at RE in a subject like ours, which isn't part of a national curriculum and had local determination. So we have a set of subject principles in the Oak curriculum, and these are strongly kind of come out of the work of the RE community, because you know, this curriculum hasn't been created in a vacuum, and I very much feel that we're sitting at the feet here of all of the amazing work that's gone on in the RE community, basically since the core report. And so we worked looking at the National Statement of Entitlement and the National Content Standard as much as we could, and so we try to draw out key themes from there. And so the big principles that underpin the Oak curriculum, one is looking at the diversity and complexity of religious and non-religious worldviews. So we're very much trying to look for the fact that you know worldviews are messy, that they change over time and that they develop. We're also trying to help pupils develop what we're calling scholarly approaches and methods. So that's the kind of the disciplinary knowledge, the tools of RE, looking at theology, philosophy, and social science, which is kind of how we've drawn that, although we're aware that you know there are other ways of looking at this, and also that we want pupils to kind of build up their own awareness of their presuppositions and values and be able to interpret what they're doing. So those are the kind of principles underpinned it. When we were making our content selection, basically the curriculum is based around a series of what we're calling threads, and these threads, again, are drawn from the national content standards. They're things like authority and influence, and they're things like continuity and change. And so we looked at all of that, and then for each unit inquiry, we then looked at what particular disciplinary lens, which way of knowing are we going to look at that? And then that frames the questions and therefore the content, if that makes sense. So the content you see, because we have a series of inquiries with questions, we've got to the content from our principles and the threads and the ways of knowing, essentially.

SPEAKER_00: 8:37

So it's very much rooted in that sort of worldviews approach curriculum. So if you're new to this approach of teaching RE, it's a really good place to go in order to get a sense of what that might look like in the classroom. I want to have a look at one or two units at some point, but I really want to think about the sort of pedagogy that sits behind it. So let's start with if you are opening up the Oak National page, what are you actually going to find there for you to use?

SPEAKER_01: 9:06

Okay, that's a great question. So if you were to go onto the kind of the curriculum plan, what you would see is you would see our unit sequence. You can either look at that for primary or secondary. That would show you for each thing, you know, year one, year two, there are six units in each going through primary, and that's made up of six lessons. So you've kind of got that whole coverage, if you like. You're able to use kind of highlighting buttons, so you would be able to highlight particular threads and see which units link to those threads. And there are also kind of further buttons which allow you to look at the lens, if you like, or the way of knowing. So you would be able to say, for example, in in year one, the very first unit is called New Life, How is a New Child Welcomed? And that's a social science way of knowing, and so it very much looks and starts with people. But there are also theology-driven units, for example, one about stories and deeper meanings, and so that very much looks at stories and thinks about how they could be interpreted. And the idea is that knowledge and these ways of knowing build as you go through the curriculum and big ideas are revisited. So that's what you would see on the page, effectively.

SPEAKER_00: 10:12

Brilliant. And just talk us through some of the topics there. So, just what are the ones that stand out or you think are great, or maybe are ones that the themes get revisited over time? So just kind of give us a sense of a few of the topics that we could find there.

SPEAKER_01: 10:24

Yeah, thank you. We're still in the process of writing all of these. I think we've done about sort of 35% at the moment. So you were not going to be able to find the lesson materials for everything we have at this moment in time. But in terms of some of the work that we've done so far, I'm really proud in primary of how we've developed this idea of stories and deeper meanings. And that's something which, you know, as a primary teacher myself, I'm really, really passionate about the value of story and also getting children to become interpreters, kind of using their hermeneutical skills. And so we have stories in year one. One of the things we've tried to do is a kind of less is more approach, and actually, our first iteration of this curriculum, which went on our website when we launched, it's interesting. As we're coming to write these lessons, we're realizing we probably had too much content as you do. And so we're trying to move to a situation where we're spending time with a story. So there might be a lesson where the pupils hear the story and then a lesson where they actually do some interpretation work. So I'm really proud of how those have developed, and I'm proud of how we've tried to really root this material in real life and real people. So, for example, we have a unit of work in year five, which is called Jews, How Does Remembering Maintain Jewish Identity? I'm proud of this because often in many kind of local syllabuses, teaching about Judaism and Jews can happen in year one and two, but can often sort of drift off, and we really wanted to have a unit which really looked at that in depth. Then it also looks at ideas of Jewish identity and it touches on issues of anti-Semitism, which I think is really, really important given the situation we are at the moment. And we do similar things with some of our units on Muslims. We're writing one in Upper Key Stage 2 about Muslims, and we're looking at issues about Muslim dress and what does it mean to be Muslim today? And we're looking at the changing role of women and how many Muslim women now work and manage their career, which again I'm hoping is really interesting and rooted in kind of lived reality.

SPEAKER_00: 12:24

And I think, you know, from my experience of the Oak Academy, the lessons are highly ambitious but really accessible. And, you know, just listening to you talk there about hermeneutics and about tackling some of the more controversial issues within the Bari curriculum, that highlights that ambition. But I think there's lots of lovely things that Oak have done to make it accessible, particularly the use of things like dual coding, particularly the use of like characters that represent those lived experiences, so that there is consistency. So, in terms of that kind of extraneous load, there's lots of similarities between the layout of the lessons, the characters that express a particular point of view. So you get that real sense of diversity but consistency. There's a lot about the structure of the lessons that are kind of very similar, so that children are familiar with the way that an oak lesson works, and therefore they can use all of their brain, I guess, on this new content. And it introduces very complex ideas in a very accessible way. And I think that's one of the huge strengths of some of those lessons that I've kind of engaged with and used. But actually, you know, I'm aware that they're written in a way that each teacher can then take those resources and adapt them for their specific context. So they're not meant to be pick up and play, that there is a way that teachers can engage with them and adapt them for their context.

SPEAKER_01: 13:50

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think I'd say two things here. So, one, I'm really glad that you appreciate the depth of curriculum design that has gone into these because a huge amount of thinking has been done within Oak by people such as Emma McRae, who's done amazing curriculum thinking about how can we make complex ideas accessible. A huge amount of work has gone into thinking about the structure of an Oak lesson in terms of having regular checks and practice tasks, which could be done on mini whiteboards, for example, to check that learning, to kind of really clearly sequence the learning so that concepts are introduced and that there's practice tasks. And we've used that in RE as well because we know that that really, really works. And the feedback we've had from teachers is exactly as you say that that does work. There are also things that we've done within the RE curriculum, which are kind of, you know, modifying and recognizing what's unique about RE and what you mentioned about the RE characters. We're really proud of those in terms of what we wanted to do was we wanted our work to be rooted in kind of lived reality and lived experience. And so we have created these characters which represent a lot of diversity within different worldviews, people who are religious or secular, lots of different ethnic backgrounds to show pupils that you know Muslims, Jews can look and behave in lots of different ways. But we do use those kind of consistently through the key stages, so there isn't a sense in which those character stories develop, and they are there quite rightly, as you say, so that you know, if teachers were to use them, the pupils would get to know them and learn more about that character and learn more about their worldview as well. So that is very, very deliberately done.

SPEAKER_00: 15:26

So you've just sort of mentioned there some of the sort of pedagogy that is used within the lessons. So each lesson comes with a sort of a do-now task, a series of questions, and then ends with a sort of plenary style question. So you've got those kind of pedagogies, and you've talked about that throughout the lesson there's these kind of like points where you check their understanding and you ask specific questions. You've talked about these RE characters that are threaded throughout the lessons. Is there any other sort of specific pedagogy you just wanted to highlight?

SPEAKER_01: 15:56

I think one of the things, and I think we're still developing this, but in terms of kind of the disciplinary knowledge, what we're trying to do is highlight on kind of the beginning slide. So we have the way we've written this for primary and secondary, which is slightly different because we recognise they're quite different pedagogies at work. So in primary, it's a character talking about, you know, what are stories or what does the tools of social science. And this is difficult because obviously we want these resources to be usable by as many teachers as possible, and teachers not to be able to come to it with having to have massive specialist knowledge. But we're trying, for example, where possible to use some of this pedagogy. So, for example, and you'll see this a lot in some of the key stage three lessons, when we're when we're looking at texts, for example, we have tried to create a slide where you have some of the text and then some questions for the teacher, and then the next slide kind of highlights bits of the text. So, kind of helping the teacher understand how to maybe use some theological tools of analysis. In some of the lessons which we've been writing recently on the census, we are looking at census data. So we're obviously introducing data to pupils and we're getting pupils to answer some questions. And some of the checks might be, you know, if they've looked at a slide saying, you know, what is the biggest worldview in the UK or in England and Wales? One of the tasks might be to look at how many Muslims are there in England and Wales. So they're applying some of those tools of, you know, can I look at a graph about the census? Can I analyse some stuff about concentrations to say, oh, you know, where do we find Jews or Muslims in the UK? And then we use our case study Muslims to say, you know, well, I've lived in Birmingham or I live in Manchester. And so we're kind of taking that social science approach. Here's some data, and that can tell us some information, but actually to get some more information, we actually need to speak to an actual person because the data only tells us so much. And I'm not saying we're doing this perfectly, but this is something which we're trying to do to kind of model some of this disciplinary or thinking around ways of knowing.

SPEAKER_00: 17:51

And actually, something that it'd be nice to bring up here is that if you're looking at the GCSE lessons, there is a exam focus within those lessons. So it's not just about content, and here is the the syllabus for this exam board. Built into that are exam practice questions and model answers and things like that. So there's a real exam focus there. And you can see there's a progression of knowledge, but there's also a progression of skills. And while the key stage two, one, two, and three does not repeat stuff that's in the GCSE, it supports that stuff and it begins to teach those skills and weave those skills to develop them for when they go into GCSE. There isn't, as far as I'm aware, anything for core RE on Oak Nash at the moment. Is there? For key stage four, is it just exam-focused stuff or is there a core RE bit?

SPEAKER_01: 18:38

No, at this moment in time, you're quite right, just because you know the project is so enormous to produce all of this in the time we've got. So we focused on that. But that is, yeah, we're looking at that as a next project effectively. But we want to do something like that well and fought through rather than rushed. Um, and I think to pick up your GCSE point, there's a couple of things we've done there. So we have tried to keep some of the approach as much as we can, you know, of the worldview's approach, into the GCSE. So the Key Stage 4 writers who are absolutely brilliant have used things like the RE characters, which we've used in one, two, and three, and we've kept those into Key Stage 4 as well. So you're still having those individuals talking about their worldview in a way that kind of fulfills the spec. And then, yes, you're right, we do start to introduce some kind of exam style questions and structuring. Whereas in Key Stage 3, we're very much having that as a key stage three syllabus. It isn't supposed to be a proto-GCSE, but we're we believe, and that's something that Nikki McGee says a lot in her blogs and and on social media, is you know, if you do a really high quality Key Stage three, then you set people up to do well successfully in GCSE.

SPEAKER_00: 19:46

Yeah. And can I ask sort of how much of these lessons and units are standalone, or whether there is a benefit to using all of them, or can people kind of pick up just odd units and fit them into what they're already doing?

SPEAKER_01: 19:58

So that's a really great question. So there are kind of two answers to this. So the first answer is that the oak materials are designed in a way in which they can be used as standalone lessons if that's what's needed, you know, to set for cover, as you say, to set for revision. So hopefully there should be enough material in the lesson on the slide deck for the teacher to be able to teach that individual lesson. And then there's a video as well, you know, if it was needed for pupils to look at that remotely at home. So that's there, and hopefully that's possible. But obviously, the curriculum has been designed to be a coherent whole, and a huge amount of thinking and work has gone into that. And when we're writing the units and when we're writing individual lessons, we're writing them through the lens of the coherent sequenced curriculum that we've created. So we're not just kind of randomly writing a lesson. We're thinking each time, right, in that first lesson we made this, so this next lesson needs to build and build until we get to the end, because this is what by the end of the unit we want pupils to know. And so they're very much built like that. And so, absolutely, you know, if schools were to use these, they would find that knowledge built over time. But the use case, the Oak is we see it as being a very wide use case. And I've actually seen on social media something which pleased me recently, someone there, you know, who I really admire in the RE world, who was saying that she was designing her um key stage three curriculum and she'd used some of our materials in year seven and she'd integrated them into her planning. And I was just like, oh, that's just so wonderful, because that's something I really hope that that would really support teachers. In other schools, it might be that they might lean more heavily and they might use more of them. In a sense, the point of Oak being free and adaptable is it is up to individual teachers and schools to do what they wish with them. You know, they're not there. It's not an all or nothing approach. You can use them in multiple ways.

SPEAKER_00: 21:54

And also to say that it's free and open access as well, which is I think such significant. Point to make. You've sort of benched us a little bit about there's lots of people sort of working on it and the sort of thinking behind it. But how is it constructed? What's the process by which these resources and lessons are created?

SPEAKER_01: 22:12

So the way in which that's done is that we have a team of primary people, and they're kind of facilitated by Pennine Learning, and they are producing the primary resources, and we have a team facilitated by Ormiston Academy, and they are doing the secondary. And all of the writers are either people who are teachers in the classroom at the moment and they've got time out of class, the comments to write them, or people who've been very recently, you know, just out of the classroom. And so they are writing these materials, and we have teams of writers, and then kind of that material is then checked and edited, and then once it's kind of all been through the various approvals, it's then uploaded onto the Oak site. And so that means that stuff is appearing on the website. You know, as we speak, every kind of few weeks or so more stuff is added. And so it might be if you've looked at a unit, say a few months ago and it wasn't there, it might well be there now. So we're not waiting till everything's written to kind of throw it all on the site at once. As things become written, they are kind of added as they go.

SPEAKER_00: 23:14

Brilliant. And we'll add links to where people can find those things to the show notes. Because I think actually you're right, if you looked at it sort of three, four years ago, if you look at it now, it's going to look very, very different. Again, this is something that we've kind of touched upon and hinted at, but it'd be quite nice to sort of really think about how teachers can use this. So there's so many different ways that we can use it, but let's just run through a few of them.

SPEAKER_01: 23:38

Yeah, so it might be helpful if we look at a couple of examples. So if I was to give a primary example, there's a unit in year two about kind of places of worship, for example. And in that, we're introducing pupils to Jews, Christians, and Muslims, and we introduce them to particular characters who show their particular places of worship that they go to. And that's been deliberately done to show a kind of diversity because I'm really, really passionate in from the get-go in Key Stage One, we need to do things like show children that not everybody has a religious worldview. And so we very much have you know humanist characters in some of our units there to show that having a non-religious worldview is a really important part of the UK today. Don't want to wait for them to have to get to kind of being eight or nine years old before they find that out. And secondly, that there's a big spectrum of what people's worldview looks like. So some people might go to a church, for example, which looks like a very traditional church, but other people might worship in a building which wasn't originally a church. So that kind of diversity is really, really important to me. So you could use that unit as it is, but actually, I think where some of the energy in these will be is where there's a synergy between what we produce at oak and what is done locally. And so it might be that you know you're a primary teacher in a rural part of Somerset, say, and actually, you know, in your local village there's a church, and so you might want to use the case study of your actual church. And so you could take parts of our work, you know, we use an example of a church in a city which wasn't a church, that might be a really interesting contrast to that Somerset, more traditional church. Do you see what I'm saying here? And again, you know, if you're a primary teacher in rural areas where you don't have that access to diversity, us kind of offering images of mosques and synagogues and characters will hopefully be really, really helpful. If you live in a highly diverse area of a city, you might not need them. So I see that kind of adaptability like that, where you might put your own local stamp on it. One of the units which we're just writing at the moment, I've been um writing this, and Naylor Missus, who's brilliant, has been kind of leading this, is looking at worldviews through the census. And the idea is this is for year six. By the end of that, they will kind of write a worldviews report based on their local area. And so we've modelled this, we've looked at Manchester and Bristol, because this is where we're both from. So we're providing information, local census information looking at Bristol and Manchester. But I imagine if you're teaching this in Leicester or Norwich, say, I would hope that you would be encouraged as a teacher to find the local data for your local area and put that in. So that's very much a kind of use case I see for it, that we're providing maybe a model of how might these slides look or what kind of questions might you ask. But actually, we want to kind of get the teachers' agency and autonomy to use that for themselves.

SPEAKER_00: 26:28

It's so fascinating because I think it's quite empowering for teachers to take away a lot of the thinking behind creating and constructing a curriculum or ordering or sequencing or selecting, but at the same time empower teachers to adapt it to their own contexts and kind of fill in the gaps of their context. You know, because actually I think that I used to work in a school where there was very, very few theists, very few people were religious. And so for them, they just didn't understand that most people in the world are religious. I'm now working in a context which is very highly religious and quite diversified. And so they're struggling with the non-religious views in that some people don't have a faith. And so what this does is it kind of moulds those two contexts together so that students have a really rich exposure to the diversity within worldviews that takes into account their context, but also helps them to see outside of it as well, to prepare them for life in modern Britain, I think, and beyond. We've talked about that this is a curriculum that you can just use as it is, you can adapt it to your own context, you can use it for cover lessons. We've talked about the fact that actually you could use it as CPD for teachers with other specialisms. Is there any other ways that you feel that the RE community can use these?

SPEAKER_01: 27:43

I mean, I think the most important thing I should say is obviously RE is locally determined. And so, you know, the way in which you teach your curriculum is going to depend on the sort of school you are and your local syllabus. And so one thing I would really say is that the Oak curriculum is not a replacement for the locally agreed syllabus. What it is is doing it's offering resources to help with that. And in a sense, the resources can be flexible. And so, for example, you know, if you were teaching in your locally agreed syllabus and you have to cover a particular worldview, or it's suggested that a particular worldview was looked at in a particular key stage, and in the oak curriculum there is a unit or question which is in a different year group or different key stage, it could be used and adapted to support that. I think that's a really, really important thing that the oak curriculum is designed to be kind of a synergy with the local curriculum. It's not trying to replace any of the existing structures in RE whatsoever. It's literally trying to offer, hopefully, some high-quality models for those teachers in whatever context they are, in whatever kind of support they need.

SPEAKER_00: 28:46

Now, we're in a situation now where there's potentially some big changes that are going to come up in the RE community in terms of whether we become national curriculum, whether the national content standard becomes a statutory document, what's going to happen to those kind of local ways of determining curriculums. Also, something that you've said is that the Oak curriculum is not finished. There are still more resources and units that are going to be introduced moving forward. Just talk to us a little bit about where you see the future of Oak, sort of things that are coming up, things that you might need to think about or that you want to develop.

SPEAKER_01: 29:21

I mean, that's a great question. Obviously, we're all awaiting the outcomes of the curriculum assessment review. And I hope, like I think lots of people in the RE community, that, you know, we want to see RE given a much more equal status with other subjects. And we firmly believe that that should happen. And that that is the best for the subject, as Catherine Wright has talked about, you know, about giving pupils equity in religious education. I really passionately believe in that myself. So, in terms of the future, in a sense, that slightly depends on what happens. In terms of where these resources sit, obviously they are there and they are going to support the situation. Whatever happens, it might be that things need to change, but you know, without preempting any kind of changes in our way, it's very hard to kind of foresee where they're going. I mean, I know, for example, just on a more mundane level, that um the team in secondary were working very closely with the exam boards, kind of looking at some of the future changes that are coming up around exam specs and talking to them to make sure that the resources that we're producing now are cognizant of some of the changes that have taken there. So, in a sense, that we know that we're future-proofing them as much as we can for the moment.

SPEAKER_00: 30:32

And I think that's the reality, isn't it? Is that for Oak National and for any good curriculum, if you're writing good RE curriculums, then that should then fit into any kind of changes that are happening because this is an example of that great curriculum. So we should hope that. So that's really exciting. Now, I think we want to take some time just to kind of thank people that have been involved in this. I think there's been a number of RE experts across the country that have contributed to this curriculum. So I want to thank absolutely everybody that's been involved with this because I think it's such a glorious resource for us to be able to use. So thank you. But I also want to thank one very special person who is known to many of us in the RE community, and that is Dawn Cox. And many of you will be aware that Dawn and her of Dawn and her contribution to the RE community as a whole, but also is a friend to many of us. But she's made quite a specific contribution to Oak, and we just want to sort of celebrate that now. Just talk about sort of Dawn's work with Oak.

SPEAKER_01: 31:32

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it was uh when I heard that uh Dawn was going to be coming along and helping with this, I was in awe really, because of all the people in the RE world, I think Dawn was uh one of the kind of leading lights really, and so I I felt quite like, oh my goodness, I'd be quite terrified to be able to work with her. I was quite terrified. But Dawn was fantastic because her great gifts, I think, were her huge connection to the classroom and her real understanding of what students needed, but also what teachers could do. And so she was always brilliantly challenging in terms of kind of challenging us about what we were doing and whether we were aiming too high or whether they were too abstruse, which was really, really helpful, but also just offered real clarity of thinking around, particularly around thinking around disciplinary and ways of knowing. She massively shaped the key stage for resources and the structure and was really, really helpful. Uh, I remember a conversation with her where she was just saying, you know, how do we make sure that the unit question is answered all the way through? Uh, and we always keep that in mind, which is absolutely the right thing to do. And some of the thinking around personal knowledge, she'd written that blog really recently about ideas of personal knowledge, and I still don't think we've got this quite right, but we've definitely tried to kind of integrate some of her ideas. And so, yeah, I mean, I don't think I can downplay how much influence and thinking she had, not just on the secondary, but actually in terms of the primary as well, in terms of the framing of the way the resources were put together.

SPEAKER_00: 33:07

Yeah, and I think she's just someone that always asked the right questions. And they weren't always easy questions. No. But her goal was to make exceptional RE. And actually not just exceptional RE, but exceptional education. You know, I think her legacy extends beyond RE, but actually looks at what makes really, really good classroom practice. You know, I think her legacy will will be immense. Absolutely, yeah, definitely. And thank you so much for taking time out of your day to come and talk to us, kind of enlighten us about Oak National and what it is offering and how it can enhance what we're already doing in the classroom. I really appreciate that. And it's been a really lovely chat just to celebrate what the RE community has done, because this is not one person, this is not a few people, this is a whole team of people that have worked incredibly hard to create something which is a really good model of what RE could be. So thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01: 34:06

No problem, it's been an absolute pleasure. And um yeah, I'm always looking forward and listening to feedback about what we've done so far and how we can improve it. And I do just want to say two things, really. One, that this is very much a team effort, and there are so many brilliant people involved in this who are working really, really hard to do this. So I'm so, so grateful for them. And secondly, that the RE community is quite an extraordinary community, as I think we've seen recently. There is so much talent there. This is just a contribution to the overarching enormous talent and wisdom within the RE community, and we're not at any point saying that this is anything better than anything else out there, but we just hope that this provides some other resources and help for teachers which they can use.

SPEAKER_00: 34:49

Thank you, Adam. Adam, I ask all my guests this, and I don't quite know how it relates to our conversation, but I'm interested in it anyway. If you could wake up tomorrow, one thing was different about the world, what would you hope it to be?

SPEAKER_01: 35:01

Okay, so that's a great question. My other passion outside of the world of Ari is actually natural history and the environment, and that's my kind of other love, really. I'm a bit of a bird watching and nature geek, and that's the thing which causes me kind of the most sadness in the world, really, because I I love animals and I love the world. If I could wake up the next morning and found that, say, all the rainforests had regrown magically overnight, and all of the forest cover we'd lost uh and hedges, which meant that the birds were back, and we could hear bird song even in the cities, and beaver were roaming the wild, and that would be the single biggest thing other than that made me happy because I loved nature growing up. It's the thing which brings me the greatest sort of happiness when I am sad, really. And so I think that I'd love to think everyone in the world would be able to just see these beautiful animals. And I think if we could see them again, we might like value them better as well.

SPEAKER_00: 35:53

But it's so interesting because I think during lockdown that happened. Brighton is my hometown. And I remember when we were allowed to go out, going back to Brighton and just walking around the streets and hearing birds in this city. It absolutely blew my mind because I it's just been so long since I'd heard it. And if you look at all the statistics of what happened to kind of wildlife over that time, you know, this is incredible. You know, and I think there's, you know, something to be said for progress and technology and all of this kind of stuff. But life has always got to be in balance. And I think you're right at the moment, the balance is away from what is nature. I think it's naive because, you know, look at history, nature always wins eventually. So, you know, and actually we've lost that sense of our connection to nature, and I think that has physical, emotional, spiritual kind of ramifications if we lose our connection to nature. So I think you're absolutely right. I think it's a lovely way to end the episode as well. So thank you, Adam. My name is Louisa Jane Smith, and this has been the R.E. Podcast. The podcast for those of you who think RE is boring, but it's not. It creates an incredible community to support our young people navigate today's world. But thank you so much for letting us bore the life out of you.