There are a few questions flying around about @OakNational l that I wanted to answer. Being transparent is important for all public servants and just because there is a crisis on it doesn’t mean you get a hall pass. Being kind is also important, particularly to volunteers.

First up our legal status. This happened fast, so right now we're incubated at the Reach Foundation (a charity). That means I’m accountable to our Project Board (see our website) who are accountable to the Reach Foundation Board (who are accountable to the Charities Commission).

Before we came along, the Reach Foundation’s work was focussed on opening a children’s hub in Feltham. The charity is a sister organisation to the great team at Reach Academy Feltham.

We set up this structure as it gave ready-made systems and processes (as well as governance) for important things like safeguarding & finance at a time when our focus was on getting our first week of lessons online. We’re really grateful to the Reach Foundation for their support.

Second up on how we’re funded. The vast majority of our costs have been covered by generous donations of time (e.g. the schools and school trusts have lent us their amazing teachers and google lent us some of their technical experts).

There have been some initial costs (e.g. we had to buy a domain name and little microphones for recording) which the Reach Foundation provided the money to cover.

But because this is a big collaborative effort for the system, when we spoke to the DfE they generously offered to support us so that no individual or school was out of pocket for the collective effort. They have committed £300k to the project for the duration of the lockdown.

Some of that has gone on covering initial set up costs, the majority we are yet to spend. We’re working this week to listen to what teachers and families tell us us they need before we commit it. Inclusion is probably top of our list. More subjects is probably second.

Third up quality assurance. Our first principle is that we trust teachers and our heads of departments. They know their subject, sequence and pedagogy. We need more of this trust in our system.

But, because we were sharing lessons more widely than a single school, we also introduced peer review, a technical check and a professional development into the process. This added to the workload of already busy teachers during their holiday but we all think it was worth it.

We didn’t catch everything. Of course there are few bugs and snags and @dmthomas90 blog set this out up front. The teachers who created these lessons are more aware of this than anyone. My job right now is to keep a high bar on standards and a higher bar on kindness.

Finally, how did we match teachers/curriculum. We’re not a big bureaucracy. Our initial group came up with names & called round. We didn’t have time for complex recruitment sifting & teachers are, & will remain, employed by their school. It’s was never a formal hiring process.

Members of our project board, @dmthomas90 and I did run a short process to match schools and teachers to areas of the curriculum we thought they had particular expertise, or subject knowledge, or had written some really good curriculum materials in the past.

As with everything, we’re not saying that there isn’t more we can do - and we’re working on a process to bring more volunteers in from a wide range of schools, subjects and backgrounds. Watch this space!

I do hope that clears a few things up. We’ve just topped 0.5m lessons in two days which is incredible. I think the only person more proud of @OakNational than me is my mum. Which as my mum is her prerogative!