Introducing our citizenship curriculum partner

Geoff Wells is the citizenship and RSHE Lead at Oak National Academy. Prior to starting at Oak, Geoff worked on the senior leadership team of two successful secondary schools, including Harris Academy Battersea. Geoff has worked with a number of schools and school leaders to develop their RSHE and personal development provision.

Developing our new citizenship curriculum

Our focus is on lowering workload and supporting teachers to increase their expertise. Over the coming year we’ll be creating a new secondary citizenship curriculum with teaching resources designed to better support your planning, in-class teaching and to help you develop your own curriculum.

Our fantastic partners reflect the diverse range of educational providers and expertise across the country. We are one of many teaching resource and curriculum suppliers, and I am delighted that we can improve this offer so that teachers have an even better choice of foundation materials to build upon in their classroom.

Curriculum partner

I am proud to announce that we will be collaborating with the Association for Citizenship Teaching (ACT) to develop and update a new secondary Citizenship curriculum. ACT is the subject association for Citizenship, representing teachers and others involved in Citizenship education.

ACT works to transform the lives of children and young people through high-quality Citizenship education. To achieve this, it provides membership services and education programmes, offering professional development, training, networking opportunities and teaching materials, including the academic journal, ‘Teaching Citizenship’.

ACT advocates for the subject, supports subject research and offers strategic policy advice. It is an organisation for teachers, led by teachers. ACT is the DfE recognised subject association for Citizenship and is richly experienced in curriculum design and development having created core curriculum materials for its national network of teachers as well as producing Oak materials during the pandemic. I’m thrilled ACT is supporting our ambitious initiative.

Our citizenship curriculum principles

Our new subject principles are a rigorous guide to ensure that our new curriculum is grown from a strong foundation of core values and key ingredients, ensuring that our curriculum is cohesive and enriching.

For citizenship this will ensure that our curriculum:

• Focuses on the knowledge and skills specific to Citizenship, including:
  • Ensuring that all content is grounded in the law;
  • Democracy, government and the rights and responsibilities of citizens
• Has a focus on the application of knowledge through dialogue and debate, civic responsibility and democratic engagement.

One of our curriculum principles is diversity, and this will be a focus for subject expert groups.

Our overall curriculum approach

These citizenship-specific principles dovetail with our overall approach to curriculum design, and how we hope teachers can use Oak, as explained by Emma McCrea, our Head of Curriculum Design. You can also find out more about the new partners and subject experts we’re excited to be working with.

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