Are textbooks (printed or digital) not used any more? How do students revise?

My DC has just started Latin at (state) secondary and it's really weird, no textbooks, just printouts from the teacher. Luckily, DC immediately noticed the printouts are from the same 80s edition of the Cambridge Latin Course I still have on our bookshelves and has been enjoying reading ahead of the lessons.

It's so unusual to use dictionaries these days, but I'm going to try to get DC using my old Latin dictionary and grammar books, too.

If ofsted has suddenly rediscovered a love for textbooks, I can foresee schools getting downgraded because they don't have them or enough of them.
And whilst we all know that ofsted isn't worth the paper that the grades are written on it will be by their measure that schools get shit upon.

Is anyone asking you to @MrsHamlet?

Opinions vary but for my part I think it's still a useful skill to be able to use a reference book. We do have some class sets mostly used for cover. Students can buy their own copy should they wish. A few do.

Online sources can be great but you don't always know who writes them. And quite a few of the sites that are useful for my subject have a hefty price tag.

Why on earth would I teach my students how to use a textbook when we don't have textbooks?

Government IT projects have a great history, of course...

Gosh @Malbecfan that sounds great.

I would have loved that for Music A-level.

Oh @Corksoles that is far too sensible to catch on!

Also DfES can't supply enough teachers, so I don't know if I'd trust them with books tbh.

Here is a stat for you.

There are more teachers who are women aged 30-39 than there are male teachers total.

20,000 of those women leave teaching every year, many citing the difficulty of combining the job with looking after their own children.

That is more teachers than the amount by which DfES has missed its recruitment targets for the last couple of years.

Anyway, back to the books!

Imagine how much money every trust spends for various subscriptions to very primitive apps. Why government not just buy the apps or make their own?

@Corksoles there's no profit for anyone other than taxpayer to do so :) and taxpayer has no say in it.
Also there's a lot of profit for many in keeping it as it is.

In general, when UK government call other goverments corrupt, it now makes me smile. If smth is legal doesn't mean it's fine.

OK, I have been enjoyably schooled on macroeconomics. Let me try on micro - this argument about paying for textbooks. Why is the taxpayer shelling out for Oak Academy for example rather than contracting with a publisher directly? We could be the monopsony buyer couldn't we? (I know, different boards, academies etc - but even academies might choose a DfE £7 textbook over a £40 one? )

Yes, very worrying, just what are they teaching kids in English lessons these days? I thought it bad enough that they seem to have stopped doing "comprehensions" on things other than poems and literature - they used to do them on instruction books, recipes, etc. But kids being unable to use a textbook after a decade of supposedly "quality" education is crazy!

And this is sixth form?

I have to train my sixth formers to use textbooks. They are unfamiliar with indexes, references, footnotes, glossaries, titles and labels and figures, conventions like "below" and "above" and tbh their vocabulary isn't all that and they're not very hot on page numbers.

Omg

Same here. We were issued brand new history text books for O level. Mine got a bit wet after a swimming lesson when there was a small hole in my plastic bag with my towel in it. All down the outer edge got wet and wrinkled. I dried it out as best I could, opening the pages to dry them out so they didn't stick together, but the wrinkles at the edge remained. When it came to end of year book return day, they refused to take it back and we got a bill for it. Anyone forgetting to bring the text book to class had to stay behind at break or lunchtime for a kind of "mini detention".

Not sure why children losing or forgetting books doesn't have consequences anymore.

If you didn't return the textbooks ar dds school, they got added to your bill at 30 each.

Needless to say I kept a beady eye on them and returned them

A few teachers have mentioned text books costing £20 each.

That's cheap for academic books, which is probably because they have a comparatively large target market. Specialist medical text books etc were easily 3 figures even 30 years ago.

Our school was in a deprived area and used to buy school shoes for the kids who would turn up in Nike Trainers whose parents claimed they couldn't afford school shoes...guess how long the shoes lasted before they were "lost" and the parents couldn't afford to replace them. Some parents do not give a shit about schools or their children's education and work actively against them. That isn't the impression I get from anyone on here but I can assure you there are plenty of them out there.

At my last school our budget was so small because we relied so heavily on photocopying (due to afforementioned belief that we shouldn't be using textbooks) that we could only afford one between 2 for our two gcse classes. Buying 30 books doesn't trigger a discount....and even then they don't really give you a discount. Then they got heavily defaced and damaged by kids who placed no value on education.

A few teachers have mentioned text books costing £20 each. I've had a look at several options and the £20 seems to be RRP. Why wouldn't schools be negotiating with suppliers to get hefty discounts. For bulk purchases, a school should only be paying around a tenner for books with an RRP of £20. Don't they know how to negotiate for bulk purchases? A school certainly shouldn't be trotting along to Waterstones and paying RRP!

Definitely worth reading the other thread.

I am a secondary school teacher (of Economics) and I like textbooks. Got a huge collection at home.

I can't always admit that professionally 😂.

I have to train my sixth formers to use textbooks. They are unfamiliar with indexes, references, footnotes, glossaries, titles and labels and figures, conventions like "below" and "above" and tbh their vocabulary isn't all that and they're not very hot on page numbers.

We order everyone a revision guide and then recharge it. Anyone hard up gets it free.

The main barrier is the proper textbooks are £40 and go out of date quickly.

I mean, the UK was in the EU 8 years ago (or 3 or 4 depending what you mean by "in").

I totally agree OP. My dd1 is in y9. She has some SEN so struggles with organisation and I've been trying to help her with a system of revision for end of year tests etc but she seems to have nothing to revise from. I asked her teachers but they couldn't really help. They pointed to the curriculum guides on the school website and suggested I buy a letts revision guide but it's not really the sass having a book to work through. Eceb the revision guides seem a bit sketchy and I don't really know which chapters they've been focusing on. They didn't even have all the subjects in Waterstones. I was frustrated, but assumed it was just our school/not daughter being vague. Didn't realise it was a national shortage of books

@WonderingWanda good news though, hope it lasts :))

Agree with all the posts saying textbooks were discouraged. Recently I've been told that we should be using them again and that ofsted 'like' them. This should tell you everything you need to know about ridiculous fads in education based on what senior leaders have heard ofsted like. Sick to death of knowledge organiser's, retrieval quizes at the start of every lesson, visualisers, cold calling or no cold calling depending on what's in fashion. I wish we could be allowed to use our professional judgement about what is needed for the class in front of us. Not all these 'non-negotiables' we have to shoehorn into our lessons in case slt are skulking about doing learning walks in the name of improvement.

@Corksoles UK is 23rd in GDP per capita. Ireland is 2nd for some reason.
https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDPDPC@WEO/USA/DEU