Choking on costs fo sxith form education

[Piggywaspushed]

So DS1 has come home from college today with a book list. Books are marked essential or recommended.

The essential books alone amount to £150 just for year 1!!

I teach English and we do always ask students to buy set texts so they can annotate them - but his list includes £35 text books. This is in addition to the £180 per term bus fares.

Is this in line with everyone's experiences of a 21st century education?

In terms of the charities - obviously that isn't relevant to me but it is nice to know they exist. the sixth form does offer a bursary to certain students and a travel bursary. they also pay students with 'exceptional results' so they get to buy their books for free if that's how they choose to spend their £450 a term.

DS is going off to uni next week.

He is getting £1500 of free e-books for the course. I wonder why schools can't do something like that?

I am guessing that unis run themselves more effectively as businesses, although I would bet your example isn't very widespread.

It does sound a very generous deal!

I meant to add that only the set texts and a couple of the revision guide type books on my DS's reading list come as e books!

The reviews of some text books as e books are awful, too....

I wonder if the Uni used their purchasing power to get the e-book discount.

I get impression that a lot of 6th forms, my local one included, run on very thin margins, they can't subsidise hardly anything, really.

e books are pretty useless for revising from.

One of the books dd need is low availability & actually cheaper new than second hand (£25 vs £58). I've been watching it go in & out of stock all summer, managed to get a new copy but it is now unavailable again for 1-2 months. Some of the new spec books aren't even in print yet, let alone readily available in good condition second hand copies.

When dd has finished with hers & if they are in half decent condition, I'll be giving them to the school. We can just about manage the cost but I know there are families who can't.

The rail card thing drives me insane. We chose* to go to an ooc school & accept the added costs of that but for the cost of a ticket to double while she's still in full time education is just wrong (she's old in the year so we've been paying the adult cost for most of year 11 too). There are no railcards or discount systems available, neither our home county nor the school county provide any travel assistance. Bursaries are not available to us because of our income (obviously - nor should they be but you have to be on a tiny income (we're talking about SE prices here) before you qualify).

dd is doing sciences but nieces are both doing arts subjects - the costs of that are terrifying. They've been getting subject related materials for their birthdays since GCSE started.

(* as much as it is a choice when the other options are scarily bad)

actually I take that back - e books are useless full stop.

It is also a bit dangerous to buy books etc at the start of the holiday before results come out (like my new vs second hand example below). I took the risk & it was okay but they started on Wednesday, they need the books no later than money that doesn't give you an awful lot of options for shopping around or searching out second hand copies. You'd have to get local book shops to order them in so really it is amazon or nothing.

Watch out are trying to get year 1 of the OCR physics B course, it is now in very limited supply - I expect someone will start selling them as new at great profit - you can still get the combined year 1 & 2 but it is limited numbers and obviously double the price. There are loads of year two copies. A lot of the text books for the revised specs get absolutely slated in reviews - full of errors, some have been withdrawn (I believe that happened with the new spec maths GCSE text books too).

I would look at local charities as an option.
The school in our Oxfordshire village closed many moons ago, and the CofE who owned and sold the building, put the proceeds in trust for children of the village. Now any full time student in the village, up to the age of 25 I think, can apply to the trustees for a grant, for educational purposes.
Personally, I am appalled that we have had such an erosion of investment in education and young people. What sort of future will we have if we don't support our children to achieve their best? Higher education is becoming the preserve of the rich again.

(bloody typos - if you can make any sense of my posts, well done!)

Could I highlight the possibility of bursary for students whose parents are in low income? Probably won't apply to many posting, but would help some, I'm sure (caveats apply as I'm in England). Get your 6th former to ask for the forms/info from their school. Bursary can assist with books, travel, clothing, lunches etc! There is discretionary bursary as well as income based.

"I get impression that a lot of 6th forms, my local one included, run on very thin margins"

It isn't an impression. It is a fact. Education is seriously underfunded these days and in many cases it isn't a narrow margin, but a zero margin.

I agree they run on very very small margins and it makes me furious too.

However, mine does offer scholarships for the 'most able' , for obvious exam data improvement and poaching reasons and it does stick in my throat that they can afford to fund those students, who have clearly been successful scholars.

If they were ex FSM I would have no issue at all with this funding.

Disclaimer : my DS's college has a local reputation of being financially aggressive and making fairly horrific staffing cuts for expediency.

If they do not have to spend money , even morally, they will try not to.

The school he could have gone to , had they offered his choices, has A level Eng classes of 32!!!

they all are having to save money in so many dreadful ways.

e books are useless full stop

Have to agree with that. At my son's school, they tried e-books a couple of years ago, but have now stopped and reverted back to paper books. Trouble is that they were just pdf's of the real book, so most had very limited extra functions, such as hyperlinks, interactivity, etc. Really hard to use a text book when a diagram is on the left hand page and the narrative on the right - in a paper book, you can see both, but on a screen, you have to keep flicking forward and backward which makes it harder and is really irritating.

Done properly, an online text book would have been designed to be read on a screen in landscape format, would have built in hyperlinks, plenty of interactivity, i.e. it would be a doddle to include self marking multiple choice questions on each section! Until they start doing it properly, they're a waste of space and money. The publishers are having a laugh to charge for a pdf of a book!

The only books that are suitable are reading books, i.e. for use on a kindle etc where you just read it, and don't need to make annotations or be flicking from page to page etc.

Wow! I am amazed that schools in the UK generally provide free textbooks! Is that all schools (apart from, clearly, sixth form colleges) or just those in more deprived areas?
I went to school in Ireland, and although I went to four different schools, none of them ever provided schoolbooks. I've never heard of any that did in either primary or secondary school. I do remember it was quite expensive, particularly in secondary school - and going with my mum to the secondhand shops to see what was available and hoping that there weren't too many that were new editions. And of course, selling the ones I was finished with. We also had to buy our own stationary and exercise books ... That's really great if you get most of it given to you in the UK.

I suppose you could see it as really great; or you could see us as becoming more like what sounds like a really bad system!

To answer your question: it is less usual for students under 16 to have to fund their education, but it is creeping in (sometimes in less obvious ways such as 'school fund' euphemism or PTA fundraising. Neither of these things are meant to fund essential school equipment)

At my place of work, we provide books to students but in my subject we actively encourage them to buy their own but that is more because that is a helpful support to their own revision and learning.

It is also possible to find ways of teaching which don't rely heavily o textbook use. I'll be quite cross if I buy all these books and the DS1 never uses them and they gather dust!!

I think one of the very bad issues in UK education is that the examination boards are also publishers and so benefit enormously from changes in syllabus.

Venus I went to secondary school in Ireland too, and it was pretty normal for siblings or even cousins to share textbooks. Breaktime was a mad dash between classrooms!
Now DS is at University he's in a student house with others from his faculty and they have their own "library" of shared books (obviously the original owner has first dibs) and it's working well.
Much to the relief of the parents!

I think one of the very bad issues in UK education is that the examination boards are also publishers and so benefit enormously from changes in syllabus.

Couldn't agree more!

Is this a private school? My DC is in 6th form and the school buy all the text books?

Is this a private school?

Tempted as I am to say RTFT (politely) the answer is hahano!

Private schools tend to provide books what with the £1000s of fees!

Over here (Ireland) we pay for school books from the start... often over £100 per child per year from the age of four (can be over £300 in higher years). We pay for every pen/pencil used, book written in. We also pay over £50 every time a child over 6 years goes to the GP, plus the cost of medicine which can easily add over £50!
As a mum of six, this can run up to almost €1000 before we even buy uniform or shoes.

Is this a private school? My DC is in 6th form and the school buy all the text books?

You misunderstand Piggy my DC is in a styae school 6th form and they provide all the books.i thought state schools had to?

state school

...they provide all the books, I thought state schools had to

No. Your experience is rare. None of the parents on this thread have children at private school. Most 6th form students (16-18yrs) are expected to fund the costs of travel, textbooks and equipment themselves.