The Design & Technology Association is delighted to win the tender to deliver Design and Technology educational content across Key Stages 1-4 on Oak National Academy

Published 27th March 2024

Many of you will be aware of the Association’s work with Oak National Academy during the COVID lockdowns. This work was carried out in a time of national emergency, with students sent home at very short notice and with students and their anxious parents uncertain when schools would re-open and resume normal service.

We quickly reached out to the D&T community and pulled together a small but incredibly productive team of superhero teachers who worked with us to produce lessons and teaching materials across Key Stages 1-3. These lessons have gone on to be streamed and downloaded thousands of times, not only during the lockdown period but subsequent to schools’ returning to a new version of ‘normal’.

This work was, by necessity, intense and pressure driven. We worked to a prescribed system, and while, given more time, I think we would all admit that there is content that we would have delivered differently or added to, we released resources that were well-received by teachers, students, and their parents nationally.

It was thought at the time that Oak Academy was a body with a limited lifespan and that whilst the content created would remain open source for teachers, it was unlikely that any new content would be created. However significant numbers of teachers carried on using Oak content when schools fully reopened and research found their number one request was for Oak's curriculum and resources to be updated and designed for in-class use, rather than remote education and from this a new tender process emerged.  

We are delighted to announce today that the Design & Technology Association has successfully tendered for Oak curriculum work to be carried out initially over the next eighteen months but with two one-year extension options as part of the contract terms.

We have partnered with the British Nutrition Foundation, which will work with us to deliver food and nutrition content at key stages 1-3. The Design & Technology Association will design and create curriculum content across Key Stages 1-4 inclusive. The two organisations will develop over three thousand content learning hours in partnership between this month and Summer 2025.

Tony Ryan, Chief Executive of the Design & Technology Association, stated, “We are delighted to win the tender for this work which, essentially being a government-funded contract, was not easy to bid for. It is important that D&T is included on the Oak platform, and we are thrilled to be working with the British Nutrition Foundation on this project. Together, we can’t wait to get started and look forward to producing high-quality content that will be free to all users”.

The scale of the project will require the Design & Technology Association to increase its staffing capacity modestly, and we will be advertising the first post from this week.

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