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

I think textbooks did really serve to even the playing field for kids with neurodiversity back in the day. If you couldn't follow a word in class but you wanted to catch up, you had a means. The idea that every kid has access to the Internet is bonkers. As is the massive assumption that they'll look up chemistry bitesize rather than get distracted.

I think it's a huge huge shame we, the 5th or 6th largest economy in the world, can't furnish our kids with er...books.

This is beyond horrific.

"I retired from secondary teaching in 2013, but well before that the edict came from senior leadership that we shouldn't be using textbooks, but making our own resources, as relying on textbooks encouraged lazy teaching, Ofsted wouldn't like it and so on.
In reality, it was probably to save money.
The result was generally a mess. A good textbook is an invaluable resource for both teachers and students. It frees up time and headspace to supplement it creatively with additional activities and resources suitable for the individual or the class, and it's useful if a student is off school for whatever reason."

"In the UK, it is considered lazy teaching to use text books. Random Internet websites are considered fine, even though they are not reviewed or checked. As a maths teacher, we printed endless worksheets which the students often lost."

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/further_education/5158860-why-on-earth-arent-subject-text-books-plugged-more?page=2

When you get to yr 10 you can find out the exam boards and then you can buy the appropriate revision textbooks. For yrs 7-9 the teacher will sign post students to a wide range of online resources such as maths watch, seneca as well as BBC bite size. You tube is a pretty good resource too. Lots of walk throughs for maths, science and English literature.

In my school it's always between 10 & 20% opting for Music.

However, my points still stand. Many textbooks are not well-written, loads have errors and they go out of date really quickly. They cost more than schools can afford. Bespoke resources distributed digitally are more cost-effective and also greener in that they do not require paper being produced and books being transported.

As an example of poor writing, the former HMI for my subject wrote a resource for A level. Almost every section has fundamental errors in it.

@Malbecfan very few students choose music for gcse. I'm more worried about maths/english/history/triple science.

Not RTFT but teach in a secondary school.

Firstly, I haven't found a textbook for Music that has the right level of depth. The GCSE one for my subject goes into way more detail than students need. It is pretty heavy. If students have similar books for each of their 5 subjects per day, they simply wouldn't be able to fit them into their bags or carry them.

At £20+ each, our budget simply won't stretch that far. We only have 16 in y11, but 31 in y10 and 30 in y9, so that would blow our entire capitation budget.

We use Teams and OneNote. I set up a OneNote notebook and have the content library divided into sections. I pop lesson resources, mark schemes, and other useful stuff in there so that students can access them whenever they want. All our students have a laptop. We also subscribe to a brilliant resource online which has revision materials. We can set quizzes or revision and can check up on who has accessed it and their score. For Music, simply reading about something isn't a great way of revising. Our online provision uses sound clips, video, colour etc.

Found an intresting explanation here
"The arrival of the interactive whiteboard in the 2000s also meant that a different way of teaching could be facilitated and this was during a time when, to cater for differentiation, it was considered lazy by Ofsted to use a textbook, which was one resource as opposed to many created for all the different needs. In addition, teachers were perceived to be more ‘lazy’ if they used a textbook in class instead of coming up with the full lesson themselves.
We are now getting more pedagogical research that favours other methods of differentiation and so it may be that textbooks might start to make more of an appearance at Secondary, alongside the fashion for a more knowledge rich curriculum than a skills based one of the recent past. We would also need to re-train our young people back in to books and away from digital resources if they were to truly make a wholesale return to all."

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/secondary/4292893-are-text-books-a-thing-of-the-past

We were once so excited to find a celebrities name in a book, we knew she went to our school. But was so funny seeing her name.

Crikey! Decades ago we had textbooks for every subject in secondary school. When they were issued, we had to write our name and the date of issue on a form stuck into the flyleaf. At the end of the year or when it was no longer needed we had to hand it back and the teacher checked for condition and initialled that it was OK. If it hadn't come back our parents would have been invoiced for a replacement copy, I believe. To keep the books in good condition during a year of being knocked about in our school bags they had to be covered in brown paper, which was usually the first homework set in each subject at the start of the autumn term. Higher up the school this was dispensed with. Admittedly this was an independent school but I thought it was fairly universal across all secondary schools at the time. When did it stop being possible to get most pupils to take responsibility for their textbooks?

Well at the evening it was for displays but we have been to mornings too and their desks seemed to be covered in books. Will keep an eye out for one next week too!

Were these books on students' desks? I was at open morning last week but was not paying attention to it (because I feel we'll have to buy all the textbooks for home use anyway).

Why don't they come back though? Why do pupils ( everyone- not students, please !!!) have so little respect?

What has led to this?

We’ve just been round a few secondary school open evenings and they all had loads of textbooks out. For most subjects and there were tons of them!

We can't afford to let them go home, they don't come back. We have digital copies that kids can access if needed. We don't use them for everything as there are so many other great resources to access now. Ks4 and 5 kids buy revision guides though.

What an absolutely cataclysmic indictment on the current state of English education that schools can't afford books.

Ditto that the textbooks that are available don't broadly mirror the curriculum? Why?

( I know the answer to these next ones here, but it's just heartbreaking!) :

Why are children not streamed at least roughly, according to ability and why are children with ( often profound) disabilities not accommodated in more suitable settings?

The answers are I think:

1An ideological motivation from 70s onwards
2coupled with Thatcherite changes
And now of course.
3 no money

It's a disgrace. I am so glad I am child free. It's so disgusting and disgraceful and sad.

Do you use them only in classroom, or students can use them at home for revision? Do you start using them from Y7?

I'm a high school teacher, never used textbooks because

1. They're too expensive.

1. They don't fit in with what you're actually teaching. All schools follow the national curriculum but you can choose exactly what the lessons are like. Often pages in the textbook are just irrelevant.

1. Textbooks are not differentiated- they're often too complicated or too easy for pupils. Whereas with PowerPoints and Word docs, content can be altered to meet your pupils' needs.

1. Ofsted expectations- you would probably fail an observation if you shoved a text book at pupils. You are expected to be creative in your lessons.

1. GCSE we tend to use CGP guides in class. They're sort of a different version of textbooks.

Secondary teacher here. We use textbooks, we need new ones but we are due for a spec change in the next couple of years so I'm waiting to replace because they are so expensive.

There's a good discussion with the author under the article https://www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/news/new-research-shows-why-textbooks-count-tim-oates/

It's especially funny to read that textbooks discourage deeper learning. What deep learning they expect from primary school kids or teenagers? Oh please.

@Words @Badbadbunny
But I had a feeling from mumsnet that education in comprehensives years ago was of a very low quality. While quality improved, how come they phased out textbooks? Was it simple cost-cutting?

"Ideological hostility to the use of textbooks, particularly in primary schools, developed in the 1970s. Their replacement with worksheets and hundreds of thousands of bespoke written lesson plans has added to teacher workload, detracted from coherence and impacted on standards"
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-30129639

@Words I recall we were using plastic bookcovers and there was a form for writing names because they were library books and it was a standard to put borrower's name on a form glued inside the book.

I remember dd thinking BbC bitesize was far too simplistic for gcses

Dd used textbooks a lot for A levels, as well as class notes. I also bought her some revision guides. She did a lot of past papers. 2 x A stars and an A.
This was a private school and textbooks definitely a thing still.

'Rather, looking up online sources', nor rather than.