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

@Badbadbunny I could have written your post!!!

I sat O levels in 82.

We had the form to fill in at the front of each book too, with your name and the date issued.I used to enjoy reading all the names.Texts often at least ten years old.

Each time a new textbook was issued we had to 'back' it with brown paper or wrapping paper to keep it going.

Losing or damaging them was just not an option.

We got used to lugging them around. Biology and chemistry were the big beasts.

It makes me really sad that children are often not taught to love physical books as we were, rather than looking up online sources.

And something is clearly very wrong with the whole system now with grade inflation and so on. Why can Scandinavian children speak flawless English when children in our schools can barely speak or write their own language correctly? Anyway that is off topic, sorry to derail.

I bought revision guides from Amazon for DD for the core subjects which helped her especially in Maths which was her weakest subject.

I noticed no textbooks either. At A level there's "suggested reading" which I and her dad have also funded. We've bought second hand from World of Books which saves a bit.

@Badbadbunny because all those school trusts literally exist for reinventing the wheel a thousand times.

https://www.educationuncovered.co.uk/news/164366/academy-trusts-wasting-millions-of-pounds-on-highlypaid-managers.thtml

I'm so old that I was in the cohort taking O Level exams in 1980 which apparently was just after a major overhaul. We were using old textbooks - some easily 5-10 years old (there was a label in the front with names and forms of prior users!). Teachers would generally follow the text books, but tell us which chapters were no longer in the curriculum, so we just ignored those. Anything "new" that wasn't in the text books would be handed out on purple printed Gestetner duplicates. I specifically remember "sum books" for Maths which were huge books just full of page after page of "sums", starting with the basics, then moving onto basic algebra, then pythagoras etc etc - pretty sure we had them for several years and kept using them as we worked our way up the years through ever increasing difficulty levels.

But basically, I' say 80% of the "old" text books were still valid and relevant. I don't understand two things.

Firstly, why text books don't last as long any more - with some teachers saying they get lost or damaged within weeks. How could pupils in the 70s manage to look after them, remember them and not ruin them? What has changed?

Secondly, from the schools I've looked around on open days and then on parents' evenings, there were piles of text books all over the place. Why aren't they used, even if just handed out in lessons and handed back in again after being used?

I'm not a teacher, but I did teach accounting for adults at a local FE college. I never "made up" my own scrappy worksheets etc. The students used the "official" text books and work books which I followed and would give homework as being the end of chapter questions etc. But alongside that, I based lessons on two very old text books from my own student days, which I used for illustrative questions on the whiteboard during the lessons. I never felt the need for making my own resources. Between the official books and my old text books, I had plenty of "off the shelf" resources, examples, questions, etc. Why re-invent the wheel?

Not all private schools are good either and some have no textbooks. Education is very opaque in UK and lots of information online but no clear pathway.
Some of the top private schools really supporting the tutoring industry, not all kids but quite a few of them and they buy textbooks to get ahead of curriculum.

My primary school was in a "village" with around 10-15 pupils in a year group and I'm 90% sure the most advanced tech they had was an analogue phone. Nevertheless when my brother and I moved to a megapolis at 8 and 10, we were on par with city kids because we were using the same materials and getting literally the same homework they were doing.
The only explanation I have for the UK not using unified education system is that state schools were not designed to give high quality education as UK had private schools for it through the whole history.

Yes, I think I maths there are scheme that function pretty much like textbooks e.g. white rose is good for that. But nothing for science, geography or history.

I assume they reproduced them the same way they did the school letters etc.

They didn't have XEROXes or printers widely available back

I finished school in 1990. There were word processors and photocopiers, at least by the end, but there were also Banda printers in the '70s and '80s. We had quite a few purple printed sheets with the lovely smell... around age 11, we did quite a lot of maths exercises on typed sheets. It's possible they typed them out several times using carbon paper, but I think there was reprographics of some sort available. If not, I pity the secretaries...

@EBearhug my education started in 1990. They didn't have XEROXes or printers widely available back then :)) so hardback textbooks from the library + notepads were the way to go :)) in my country we had a textbook for every subject except of PE from the start and had to bring it to classes from home. We had to make sure we had all we needed for school the night before. Also every subject had a separate notepad for it.

I don't think I had a textbook for maths until secondary, where it was mostly "do exercises 4-7 from page 86" for homework. Lots of handouts, and at middle school, we worked through SMP cards. English was only ever set texts. Science not till secondary, I don't think. It was mostly languages that were textbooks all through. So a lot depends on subject.

They are already using it at schools alongside with worksheets from the same curriculum.
So unified textbooks and slides are not a bad thing if they are of decent quality.
But schools have to pay private providers for it monthly instead of getting it for free if it was developed by government and it's a waste of taxpayers money again.

@Skibberblue in white rose maths they offer the whole environment - for every lesson they have a video, a pdf file, slides in different formats, a workbook chapter. I feel some publishers will come to it eventually, cgp already provides a lot of resources in addition to actual books.

Teacher at an indie. In my subject at gcse and a level there is a printed text book to take home (which half of them lose and never remember to bring in if you ask for them to do so), an online text book and for the gcse a revision guide and exercise book. There's a web site with specialist info for this subject they get pointed towards and I post all my own presentations on classroom. So they definitely aren't short of revision resources.

About reinventing the wheel with planning. I find I teach best when I work out myself how to break the material down into chunks and explain it. I have not found any of the pre made presentations for my subject to do what I want them to and they can actually contain errors. If I try to use them I spend so much time adapting them its quicker to do my own.

@twistyizzy textbooks alone will not change too much with current approach. Now teacher unions want to ban SATs and timetables tests. Maybe state schools want to turn into places to feed children and keep them away from streets and their presumably uneducated cruel parents up to the age they'll be able to claim their own benefits :))

DDs uses a mix ie main textbook for each subject but then wider reading from online directed by teacher BUT this is an indy school so more money for textbooks + teachers have more time to check websites for validity etc.
Cost of textbooks is a massive factor.

In the second link, on the first pages they mention teachers' freedom a thousand times and quality of education 0 times. It makes me sick.
Especially because now schools are mostly in trusts and trusts control what and how is being taught anyway. But of course better spend £££ of taxpayers money on managers in trusts rather than give students unified textbooks.

@Octavia64 well for school-level maths we used textbooks mainly for answering questions, I don't remember reading it a lot. The teacher didn't have to give us print-outs - they would just say - and now open you book on page #7 and solve problems # 1-5. So we learned how to do maths properly - on paper - from the start. We had to briefly write down infomation that we have, solution in steps and the result. From the age of 7. I believe they learn how to do it properly in (some?) private schools in the UK, but nowhere near my DC's state primary school.
But for information-heavy subjects such as native language, literature, history, biology, geography, textbooks were the most useful while preparing to lessons and tests at school. Chemistry and physics a bit less so.
But, again, I get a feeling that most state schools in the UK were not intended to prepare people for degrees and only brightest ones were able to achieve in a (lack of) system like this.

There is absolutely loads of research on textbooks.

So much that I'd struggle to summarise it.

My area is maths and people write whole phds on whether textbooks are better (short answer - depends on the educational system and the textbook)

For example this paper compares maths textbooks in four countries

link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11858-018-0977-6

(You'll need an academic subscription to read it I'm afraid).

I spent some time in Shanghai looking at Chinese maths teaching where textbooks are mandated and one of their research schools there was trialling a no textbooks approach to see what the implications were.

This book explains the history of textbooks in the U.K.

books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=q7BwCQAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA93&dq=info:2JF25mfD7ScJ:scholar.google.com/&ots=Vx5YAWgUTF&sig=sCo3d11V6-qt-dv3Krhelu7Pc0c&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

I believe (some?) private schools are/were using textbooks ie from Gallore Park, so maybe they have not been using it in state sector because why bother - UK's need for professionals for a long time was covered by private sector, 50-70% of university graduates came from private schools anyway. The rest probably from grammars.
State schools used to be horrible place from what people post here. Maybe they would kill each other with heavy textbooks or smoke them (just joking but..).

That's what happens when you choose to keep class system IMO.

I come from a country with a different approach to education and it was a shock to see no textbooks at school because we were getting homework regularly starting from 6-7 years of age in every subject like reading a chapter from textbook and had to be ready to answer questions in class. It also meant that you still have information and can do homework even if missed few days at school. At university we also had textbooks for most of the subjects because most things don't change and the changes can be highlighted during lectures.
I think British approach has a lot to do with taking responsibility for education from parents/home and most parents are happy with it/never knew any better.

Yes, exactly. Don't project your negative experience at primary school onto secondary, or transmit your anxiety about online resources to your child. Primary school teachers are generalists. Secondary teachers are (usually) subject specialists.

ParentOfOne

The availability of online resources depends on the subject, for core and Ebacc subjects there are loads of websites, youtube videos etc.

Most of it though has to be paid for.

For the other subjects you are often lucky to find one at all, and if you do find them it depends on what curriculum they follow, (AQA, WJEC, OCR) etc.

And as for the bespoke nature of the material, yes if you want to do it properly it has to tailored to the class, so even having two classes for the same materials will be/could be taught differently.

I have had high ability classes with one or two pupils with SEND, classes with 1 or 2 high ability pupils and the rest low ability or SEND and classes with a full range of abilities and and issues.

The base material is the same the teaching of it and the resourcing of it is completely different.