UpGrades vs Oak National Academy

How does Oak National Academy compare to UpGrades?

Oak National Academy is a government-backed platform providing free curriculum resources, video lessons, and worksheets for teachers and students across all key stages. It was established during the pandemic and has evolved into a permanent national curriculum resource.

Oak National Academy was launched in April 2020 as a rapid response to school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, providing free online lessons so students could continue learning from home. It has since evolved into a permanent, government-funded body that creates and maintains high-quality curriculum resources for teachers and students across England. In 2022, Oak became an independent arm's-length body of the Department for Education.

Oak's greatest strength is that it is entirely free and openly accessible. There are no subscriptions, no premium tiers, and no paywalls. The platform provides thousands of video lessons, worksheets, and quizzes covering the full national curriculum from Key Stage 1 through to Key Stage 4. Teachers can use Oak's lesson plans and resources to supplement their own teaching, and students can access lessons independently for revision or catch-up.

The content quality is strong, with lessons created by experienced teachers and reviewed by subject experts. Oak has also invested in curriculum sequencing, ensuring that lessons build on each other in a logical progression. For schools in challenging circumstances or those struggling to recruit specialist teachers, Oak provides a valuable safety net of quality-assured curriculum resources.

However, Oak National Academy is primarily designed as a teaching resource rather than a revision tool. Its lessons follow a traditional watch-and-learn format, and the platform does not include adaptive AI, personalised learning pathways, or spaced repetition. There is no system that identifies what an individual student knows or does not know -- every student accessing the same lesson sees identical content. Progress tracking is minimal, there are no parent dashboards, and the platform does not provide the kind of performance analytics that schools need for data-driven intervention.

UpGrades is purpose-built for active revision rather than curriculum delivery. Where Oak provides excellent teaching resources and lesson content, UpGrades provides the adaptive practice layer that turns knowledge into exam readiness. The two platforms serve different purposes and can work well together -- Oak for learning new content, UpGrades for intelligent revision and exam preparation with adaptive AI, spaced repetition, parent dashboards, and detailed progress analytics.