Nick Gibb calls for a teacher-led return to textbooks

Trouble with a lot of online text books is that they're just images of the paper version. Eg each page is portrait, but your laptop screen is landscape, so you either have it so small you can barely read it or have to keep scrolling around. Another problem is that text books use a 2 page spread, i.e. picture on one page, explanation/key on the other, which is fine if you have a book open, but if you're on a screen, you have to flick forward and back. My son's school give online access, but he finds it a real pain to try to view on screen and prefers paper text books.

What is needed are proper "e-books", i.e. with hyperlinks, interactivity, etc. The BBC bytesize website is actually good in that it has inbuilt tests, videos, etc., - that's the format needed if e-books are ever going to be useful for school pupils.

Some schools are moving towards the e-reader option. Several schools I have been in have the iPad/tablet for every pupil policy (with mixed results, some schools succeeding with this and others it being a disaster).

I think only new free schools or those that have expanded greatly with cash injections have the lump sum cash required to go to paperless or near paperless for textbooks though.

The issue with e readers as far as English goes is annotation and , for other subjects, loss of key diagrams and pictures
Modern e-readers can show pictures and also can be annotated.

Astronotus - can only speak for DCs school but internet access is already required by all pupils at home, as many programs are used that are needed.

Any child without access can get help from the school in the computer suite, after school, to access everything needed. But apparently there isn't a single pupil in DCs year groups that doesn't have internet access at home.

Apparently when the school bought the paper text books they come with an electronic version. But we have never bothered registering for access to that, so I dont know how easy it is to use.

You'd need major new investment to allow daily access to technology for each child at each school e-readers are very cheap and I imagine could be given away free by some companies if bought with a text book contract.

Why would any resources be free?

I think your DD's must be the only school in the country to give out all this stuff!!

The issue with e readers as far as English goes is annotation and , for other subjects, loss of key diagrams and pictures . Then there's the fact that schools don't have e Readers!

As far as home goes, the choice is yours, of course.

Just had a look in my DCs school drawer and a full set of AQA third edition 2016 (9-1) GCSE Biology, Chemistry and Physics text books RRP £20 each. There is a text book for Computer science, Geography, poetry anthologies, Macbeth, Lord of the flies, revision books and guides etc. I expect they have to be returned at the end of Y11.

There is hundreds of pounds of books in there and the school is definitely not flush. Are they all no good? Must be cheaper to ditch them all and replace with one e-reader.

Julie - as long as each child has easy access to electronic equipment at school and at home. No computers in my DCs grammar school either - at least not ones that worked. A couple of their friends had no pc at home. You'd need major new investment to allow daily access to technology for each child at each school.

Back to Nick Gibb's speech - "Leading academies and free schools show what it is possible to achieve. They provide an evidence base for other schools to learn from."
Er, ... not according to a broadsheet today Nick - "64 academy schools are waiting to find a new sponsor after being abandoned by, or stripped from the trust originally managing them." That's roughly 40,000 students Nick. You didn't tell us that fact, it took a Freedom of Information request to get it.
40,000 - I wonder if they have textbooks?

So has any one mentioned e-readers and electronic text books. I can see them being a lot cheaper than a full set of paper text books for a dozen subjects, they can easily updated with any changes to the curriculum and they can be reused for several years. Schools would also save by getting rid of paper handouts, homework diaries etc.

Some excellent points being made here:

Foxjar - You are absolutely right, in place of textbooks there may be online resources, but how to stop your teenager playing games online when you think they are working.

Fffion - you are the lucky exception if you have all textbooks in your state school. We would all "like" that but many teachers don't have the option - there are just no textbooks in most schools, running hand in hand with no money.

Burntheblacksuite - shiny new textbooks on open day - Kitty is probably correct - they may well have been on trial from the publisher. Did you have a close look at them - were they the correct KS for your child's year? The new GCSE ones are all shiny - when you can get your hands on them.

Soursprout - your child is being shortchanged. CGP 9-1 are great revision guides but they are not textbooks. Your school must be extremely short of money.

Everytime ref - no textbooks and no photocopying - are you at my DC's grammar? No art resources (despite parents being asked to pay for them), no equipment for experiments, no heating, no loo paper (we took our own), no soap, no new library books, hardly any old library books, cheaper NQT teachers and the list goes on and on and on ...

So, Mr Gibb - we'd all love new textbooks for our DCs. What will schools buy them with? Money they should be using for gas and electric?

When I first started teaching in 2004 the school used 1994 copies of Chemistry for You. All students were given a copy, returned at the end of GCSE.

In 2006 the new 'Core Science' came out. The school bought enough syllabus-specific textbooks for each student in the year. They were truly crap books. They were published in a hurry (syllabus wasn't finalised until May/June with first teaching in September) and were full of errors. For example, it gave the product at the anode in the electrolysis of sodium chloride as oxygen.

Syllabus changed again in 2011, but there was no money for new textbooks.

Syllabus changed again in 2016, but no money for new textbooks. The 2006 ones have been condemned (rightfully so), so the only ones we can use are the 1994 ones.

The AQA specification includes guidelines schemes of work. For one of the topics, virtually every lesson's suggested activities include 'students research into......' How on earth can you do that without textbooks or without enough computer facilities for every timetabled class to have access each lesson?

There isn't enough money in the budget to service the fume cupboards or have the mass balances properly calibrated. Where is the money for new textbooks supposed to come from?

Noble summed it up brilliantly, as always. Unfortunately she isn't schools minister and Nick Gibb is an idiot. Textbooks would be great if it meant more money for schools and education secretaries keeping their sticky fingers off the curriculum for more than two years!
But if there were great textbooks I bet we'd have an education secretary saying "there you go! Anyone can teach. It doesn't need qualified teachers. You just need the textbook!" Sigh.

This is the problem when exam boards are profit making and run by publishing houses!

We have a "National" Curriculum (I say national in quotation marks, as I am fully aware it is England only!!!); there should be one exam board, part of the DfE, and then publishing houses would be falling over themselves to produce high quality textbooks because they'd be competing for schools' business.
And at a time when all GCSE and A levels have been reformed, I would imagine they would still be making huge amounts of money.

As an aside, irvine- maths may not have changed much over the last 40 400 years, but the methods my DC have learnt in primary have been completely different to those that DH and I learnt 35 years ago.

Yes ... I must admit I wasn't familiar with the sponsored by exam boards element. Sounds utterly senseless.

The big mistake you are making gruach is blithely assuming the textbooks are written by experts.

The ones that are available are sponsored by exam boards and generally rushed out. They are muddled and muddling.

I find DS's Spanish A level textbook bewildering in its layout and design.

They also -lots of them - limit book based content in order to get you to sign up online/buy a DVD with more material. It's all about touting for business, not the joy of learning.

Does HE really still sue lots of books itself? I would imagine much academic research is done online ,too?

I am definitely a fan of the printed word and hate loads of worksheets and screen learning. But no school of any size could ever provide a textbook for every child in every subject. We have just been given £1000 to buy some textbooks. That will buy maybe 40 books.

(I can spell resources. Just rubbish at proofreading.)

Y'know Foxjar I was about to laugh off your first question (because my answer would be highly annoying) but what you say about poorer countries puts things in a different context.

I'll tell you a story. Early 1950s - one of those places the UK would call a 'poorer country' (having stripped it of human and natural resorces). Relative of mine living there, ambitious, studied A' levels by correspondence from London. There was one particular textbook he was particularly fond of ... He used to take it down from the shelf in his study and turn over the pages while recalling his time as the London university student he eventually became. And eventually I went to university myself, to read a subject that overlapped with his. So I used the same textbook - updated by my Director of Studies.

Poorer countries ime absolutely venerate book based learning. I've read what the OP says about lack of money available - but I honestly can't see how this isn't a matter of ideology rather than pure economics. To go back to 'where's your school?' - I strongly suspect that successive recent governments - with their own children in well funded, book rich schools like the one I spoke of - don't give a toss about the academic aspirations of the rest of society. That's why there are no books.

We dont have textbook and arent allowed to photocopy worksheets at my school.

When we looked round secondary schools as prospective parents, they all had piles of shiny new exciting textbooks on show.

Don’t underestimate the power of trying to ‘wow’ at an open morning/evening....

We are able to have new samples from publishers to ‘trial’ and we normally show these at open evenings but we don’t have nearly enough for our students.

It’s like the blind leading the blind. You can’t demand teachers use textbooks on one hand and then fail them in an observation for using textbooks too much and take away their budgets for it, with the other. It’s crazy!

Teachers have been saying for years that there is definitely a place for using textbooks but we have been forced to do all singing and all dancing ‘performances’ to keep engaged the Social Media generation that I’m not surprised we have come full circle with an initiative that we knew would come around.

Wish people could just leave us to teach sometimes!

My kids have always had textbooks in every subject. I don’t get what’s not to like.

I guess students in poorer countries must manage later at uni but we're not a poor country. It's so wrong.Local libraries and school libraries are being run diwn, many schools are struggling to buy books and other basic stationary.....