ALCS urges rethink on plans for arm’s-length curriculum body
ALCS has joined five other trade bodies to write to new education secretary James Cleverly to ask for a reconsideration of the Department’s “radical plans” for an arm's-length future curriculum body.
ALCS has co-ordinated with the Publishers Association, the Society of Authors, the British Educational Suppliers Association, Publishers’ Licensing Services and The Copyright Licensing Agency to ask the new education secretary James Cleverly to suspend the creation of a new arm’s-length body (ALB) “due to a lack of evidence and of due scrutiny, exacerbated by current political uncertainty”.
The Oak National Academy is an online classroom platform that was created in April 2020 by charity the Reach Foundation as a response to the coronavirus outbreak. It has 40,000 resources and provided nearly 3,500 hours of video lesson content during the pandemic.
ALCS has co-ordinated with the Publishers Association, the Society of Authors, the British Educational Suppliers Association, Publishers’ Licensing Services and The Copyright Licensing Agency to ask the new education secretary James Cleverly to suspend the creation of a new arm’s-length body (ALB)
Earlier this year, the former education secretary Nadhim Zahawi announced plans to convert it into an entirely new arm’s-length body from the Department for Education (DfE) by this autumn. Arm’s-length bodies, or ALBs, are public sector organisations which run at varying degrees of independence from the government.
The joint letter to the new education secretary to which ALCS is a signatory, calls for the suspension of the new ALB. Instead it urges the Department to “seek engagement with our sector to find a more proportionate approach that better delivers on the Department’s policy aims and avoids the collapse of the commercial education resources sector to the detriment of all those people involved in it and supported by it, including teachers and learners.”
The letter states that “the creation of a new ALB should be a policy of last resort and there has been no assessment of need or projected future impact on either the commercial market or teacher choice”.
Here at ALCS we will keep members informed as to how the situation progresses and we’ll let you know if and when there is any action we might ask you to take.
