Case Study: Oak National Academy achieves rapid, secure scaling to ensure “no child misses a lesson” with Cloudflare

Cloudflare Access helped Oak National Academy scale online learning and ensure “no child misses a lesson” across the United Kingdom

Oak National Academy launched in April 2020 as a free online school to ensure “no child misses a lesson” during COVID-19. Facing a one-week deadline to build a public portal and strict government security requirements, the team needed fast, secure ways to give volunteer teachers and developers access to pre-production environments and to ensure the site could handle sudden national attention.

Oak used Cloudflare Access to authenticate Google IDs and segment developer and teacher access (implemented in under an hour), Cloudflare Workers to fix missing security headers in minutes, and Cloudflare’s caching, WAF, and page rules to absorb traffic and threats. The result: support for 250,000 users on day one, delivery of millions of lessons (20M by summer) and millions of users reached, an improved security grade, resilience against DDoS, compliance with government standards, and continued scale to hundreds of teachers and thousands of lessons.

Oak National Academy

Stef Lewandowski

Lead Developer