In the last two decades, in Europe and beyond, there have been systematic efforts from national governments to reset the relationship between the state and contemporary schooling (Rönnberg et al. 2022, Alexiadou et al 2023; Winton 2022).  These have often revolved around the management of schools and teachers (see Keddie et al.  2023; Traianou and Jones 2019).  Teachers’ working practices and identities have been reformed – through the effects, for instance, of commercially produced standardised curricula packages such as the ‘scripted’ curriculum (see Fitz & Nikolaidis 2020) which are used widely in Charter schools or materials produced by Swedish school companies and are used by all teachers in their schools (see Alexiadou et al. 2023).   The effects of standardised curricula on teachers’ agency have only recently begun to be explored but it has already been noted for instance, that teachers who operate within a highly structured pedagogical environment characterised by a given curriculum and a set of dominant discourses around values and teaching practices tend to understand their own agency as constrained (ibid.).  

The focus of this paper in on England, where publicly funded, privately managed ‘academies’ grouped in 'trusts' have become the most common form of school organisation (Greany and Higham 2018). Post-2010 governments have been trying to generalise this model of ‘academy chain’'- characterised by willingness on the part of chains to align themselves with government objectives and to present this as an ideal enactment of a private-public relationship, combining managerial dynamism with an ethos of the common good.  The rapid development of online resources during and after the pandemic (Bormann et al 2021; Cone et al 2021; Grek and Landri 2021) has to an important extent been the work of schools or academy trusts.  The Oak National Academy (Oak), initiated by a loose network of people who occupied pivotal positions in edu-businesses, academy trust management, and policy-making working with the Department of Education (DfE), emerged in 2020 (see Peruzzo, Ball & Grimaldi 2022).  Since 2023, Oak has received further funding by the DfE to become one of a series of large-scale interlinked projects designed to encourage among schools a standardised approach to curriculum and pedagogy. Oak promises to reduce workload and thereby increase teacher retention and well-being.  Besides Oak, the other two important government projects are the Ofsted's research reviews of curriculum subjects and the reorganisation of teacher education around a common curriculum – both, like Oak, developed since 2019. These projects aim to bridge the widening ‘attainment gap’ between children of different social classes and to reshape teachers’ work through the creation of a new ‘evidence-based’ knowledge, on which their teaching should be grounded. 

The focus of this paper is on the implications of standardised curricula, Oak in particular, for teacher agency.  The paper is part of a wider research project aimed to:   a) develop understanding of the relationship between standardised curricula, particularly OAK, and the formation of a new education state and b) to explore  Oak’s reception and enactment among teachers and leaders in English schools.  The paper addresses the second question. We draw on theoretical work that defines those dimensions of agency that are relevant to teachers and their work environment and frames agency through an ecological approach (Biesta et al., 2015).  Teacher agency is always situated in the structures and contexts that give rise to it and within which it is embedded (Biesta & Tedder, 2007).  In this body of work, agency is not a property, i.e. “not something that people have”, but “something that people do” (Biesta et al., 2015: 626). It is enacted through practice, achieved in, and through, specific contexts.

The findings presented in this paper are part of a wider research project funded by the National Education Union (NEU). The project employed a mixed-methods approach which included: a) a survey; b) social network analysis (see Peruzzo, Ball & Grimaldi (2022) which provided a deeper understanding of Oak’s expanding and diverse network; c) thirty semi-structured interviews and four focus group interviews with teachers and members of senior leadership teams. In this paper we will present preliminary findings from the survey analysis and the analysis of individual and focus group interviews. The survey collected data about educators' views of standardised curriculum packages, the ways in which they have used Oak resources, or in which they would like to use them, in their teaching, the contexts and frequency of their use; the reasons for their use and finally the impact that the use of the materials has had on their pedagogical practices and workload. The survey included both open and closed questions. It was conducted online, using Qualtrics, and was disseminated through our networks. The aim was to gather at least 1000 responses from teachers working in schools across the different geographical regions of the country at primary or secondary phase. The interviews with classroom teachers (both primary and secondary) and members of senior leadership teams in English schools. Potential interviewees were identified through the survey and our networks. Grounding agency within concrete possibilities for action (Biesta 2015), the interviews aimed at understanding how curriculum decisions were made and by whom, at identifying what opportunities for change teachers have in relation to issues of curriculum and pedagogy and at locating and explaining instances of opposition or resistance. A particular focus of the interview were the reasons for selecting Oak’s material and the leaders’ perspectives on its reception by schools and teachers. The process of analysing the data has taken place at several stages, at the end of each block of data collection and then again towards the end of the research when new themes have been identified. We anticipate that this process will be complex enough to allow for the identification of emergent themes using a qualitative theme analysis (Hammersley 2013).

The research will increase understanding of Oak’s location within the contemporary education landscape as both a key policy actor and a direct provider of curriculum materials to teachers in schools. It will provide an empirically-grounded understanding of the tensions and struggles that occur in the encounter between nationally mandated programmes of school-level curriculum design and existing practices of teaching. It will contribute to theoretical understandings of teachers’ agency on a new phase of curriculum development and state and contemporary schooling relationship, in which central resource provision has become a more central principle.

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