Oak OpenAPI
Access high-quality education content with Oak OpenAPI
We’re offering a free API to share our high-quality educational content with the broader education community, all under the Open Government Licence.
Why are we providing an API?
We’re here to support great teaching. We work to improve pupil outcomes and close the disadvantage gap by supporting teachers to teach, and enabling pupils to access a high-quality curriculum.
As part of this mission, we are providing an API to make our high-quality content available to the wider education market for free on the Open Government Licence. Whether you're an emerging EdTech start-up, an established learning tool, or a quiz-based gaming platform, you can use our content with assurance that it has been created in line with the latest pedagogical research and aligned with our curriculum design principles.
How to get started
- Sign up
- Explore
- Support
Request an API key here, or get in touch with us by sending an email to help@thenational.academy, and we'll set you up with an API key.
Use our interactive developer documentation to explore the different endpoints and which resources are most appropriate for your use case.
If you need any help with your set-up or use case, please don't hesitate to contact us. We'll be happy to support you.
What we offer
- Fully resourced curricula: we are developing our resources across the full national curriculum, and have content available across multiple subjects and key stages, ensuring that you have the materials you need to support a wide range of learning requirements.
- High-quality resources: Benefit from meticulously crafted lessons by our expert curriculum partners, all aligned to Oak's research-based curriculum design principles. Our resources are designed to engage students and support effective teaching and learning.
- Flexible integration: Our API is designed to be flexible and easy to integrate into your existing systems. If you're looking for an endpoint providing our data in a format you can't see, let us know and we'll explore solutions for you.
What data is available
Access fully resourced lessons across the national curriculum, created by our expert curriculum partners, each including:
- Teacher-led lesson videos
- Oak formatted slide decks
- Starter and exit quizzes
- Worksheets
- Interactive activities
FAQs
Slugs are a way of uniquely identifying different lessons, units or key stages. These are likely to be used for technical purposes for identification rather than ever displayed to users.
Every lesson has a starter quiz - testing pupils on the prior knowledge they will need for the lesson, and an exit quiz - testing pupils’ understanding of the lesson’s content. Each quiz has six questions. You can get these on a per lesson or per subject/key stage basis.
Content guidance warnings will fall into one of the following four categories:
- Language and discrimination
- Upsetting, disturbing and sensitive
- Nudity and sex
- Physical activity and equipment requiring safe use
The lesson field ‘supervisionLevel’ returns the description of the highest level of suggested guidance, so it is advised to use this field rather than rely on the sub-guidance levels.
However, the definitions of this ID are as follows:
1: Adult supervision suggested
2: Adult supervision recommended
3: Adult supervision required
4: Adult support required
A description of the content is given, and content guidance is suggested to help teachers better understand and prepare for the lesson, as they know their students best.
We will have our fully resourced curricula for all subjects available by Autumn 2025. We currently have fully resourced curricula in English, Maths, Science, History, and Geography (Primary). We will make all of these resources available through the API, with an early release of a representative subset available for the hackathon.
The API contains two different ways of searching for Oak lessons because we have two different databases holding those lessons.
The lesson search endpoint (/search/lessons) uses our main Oak database to do a similarity search on lesson titles. The transcript search (/search/transcripts) uses our AI experiments database, which contains video transcripts for each lesson and ‘snippets’ of those. The transcript search does a similarity search on the video transcript ‘snippets’ for each lesson, so the same query can result in a different set of lessons being returned than from the lesson search endpoint. However, it does not have the ability to filter by key stage, subject or unit that lesson search endpoint has.
We recommend you test both endpoints as one may be more suitable and/or performant than the other depending on your use case.
The available assets for each lesson may vary, so the assets endpoints are used to get the available assets for a lesson or group of lessons. The downloads endpoint, which the asset endpoint provides for each available asset, then allows you to download the asset in a zip.
If you need more help contact us here
When using our API key, please ensure you comply with our Terms and Conditions
Help us make Oak OpenAPI better
Our API is new, and we strive to make it as accessible and suited to as many use cases as possible. It is designed to be flexible and easy to integrate into your existing systems. If you have feedback or are looking for an endpoint providing our content in a format you can't see, let us know, and we'll work with you to find a solution.