Oxplore Teach has been launched by the University of Oxford as the an free online platform aimed at supporting academic enrichment in UK state schools. The platform offers ready-to-use activities designed to help students aged eleven to develop confidence and critical thinking skills, helping them to think like a “university researcher”.
This initiative is part of the University’s broader access and outreach efforts to engage pupils earlier in their educational journey. They aim to encourage more applications from state schools through introducing the idea of Oxbridge at an earlier stage. The University has improved in its state school admissions over recent years with 67.6% in the 2023 admissions cycle. However, there is still a disparity compared to the 93% of the population in state education.
The team behind the platform told Cherwell that the programme is designed to engage their “established network of schools who are less likely to send their students to Oxford”. They have been working with the senior leadership teachers at The Challenge Academy Trust in Warrington to create the programme.
The platform aims to tackle what the University calls the ‘leaky pipeline‘ phenomenon, where initially high-attaining children from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds at Key Stage 2 often cannot carry this through to GCSE or A-Level attainment.
Teachers can use the Oxplore Challenge within their timetables. They consist of a 45-minute session, which can be broken into four shorter activities, designed to be used at lunch or in after-school clubs.
The topics are designed to provoke curiosity and stretch students intellectually as they are often more philosophically inclined or research-based rather than the typical information-recall focus of their regular curriculums.
Questions such as ‘Can you build a shelter on the moon?’ are intended to prompt pupils to think creatively about space research and engineering, while others like ‘Can you speak more than one kind of English?’ facilitate exploration of dialects and language diversity.
One state school teacher from the comprehensive West Derby School in Liverpool, told Cherwell that they would definitely consider making use of the platform during lessons and considered the lessons “exciting and different”.
