Matthew Hood

Matthew Hood OBE (born Dec 1985) is co-founder and Principal of Oak National Academy, the national online classroom and teacher resource hub created during the COVID-19 pandemic. He was appointed OBE (Order of the British Empire) in 2020 for services to education.
==Personal life==
Born in the Lancashire seaside town of Morecambe and brought up between there and Blackpool as part of a "big, complicated, non-nuclear family". He was the youngest of five children. Despite describing his childhood as 'great', his family were not well off and he spent a "decent chunk" of his early childhood and late teens living in a caravan.
He attended Great Wood Primary School in Morecambe, St. Wilfrid's CofE Primary School in Halton on Lune and Lancaster Royal Grammar School. He went on to study Politics, Philosophy and Economics at the University of York.
He married Josh MacAlister, Founder of Frontline in June 2019 . They live in Cumbria, England.
==Career==
Hood trained to be an economics teacher through Teach First in 2007, teaching in Edmonton, Tottenham. He went on to become a policy adviser at the Department for Education, then North East Regional Director at Teach First, before becoming assistant head at Morecambe's Heysham High School (now Bay Leadership Academy).
In 2015 he founded the Institute for Teaching, a charity focused on developing and improving teachers' expertise. In March 2018 the Institute for Teaching merged with Ambition School Leadership to become Ambition Institute, an education charity tackling educational disadvantage through evidence-based professional development for teachers and school leaders.
Hood is also Chair at Bay Leadership Academy in Morecambe, Governor at Lancaster and Morecambe College and an independent adviser to the Department for Education.https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/925511/NPQ_Leading_Teacher_Development.pdf
Hood is a founding trustee at The Brilliant Club,a post he stepped down from in 2021. In 2015 he was awarded a Churchill Fellowship.
==Oak National Academy==
Oak National Academy was launched in April 2020 in response to schools closing to most pupils at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Hood co-founded Oak alongside David Thomas OBE (at the time , Principal at Jane Austen College).
They initially created and launched the online platform in less than two weeks. It provided high quality video lessons and resources for children from reception to year 10 in its first iteration, created by teachers volunteering their time over the Easter holidays.
During the 2020/21 summer term, 5 million pupils took part in over 20 million lessons.
Oak National Academy also hosted assemblies featuring the Duchess of Cambridge, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Prime Minister and the cast of the Lion King.
In the summer of 2020 the Department for Education awarded Oak National Academy a £4.3 million grant to expand its offer and stay open for all of the 2020/21 academic year and create 10,000 online lessons, covering the national curriculum from age 4 to 16, as well as resources for pupils who would normally attend a specialist setting. By October 2021, pupils had taken part in 130 million Oak lessons and had been used by over half of teachers in England.
===Campaigning on digital divide===
During the COVID-19 pandemic Hood campaigned to ensure low income families could access online education, given the shift to remote learning. He led a campaign to successfully persuade all the major mobile to zero-rate Oak National Academy, making it free of data charges for those accessing.
Category:1985 births
Category:People from Lancashire
Category:York University alumni