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

[ParentOfOne]

We are looking into secondary schools and are a bit shocked at what seems to be the trend of getting rid of textbooks in the UK.

This has been a bit of problem in primary school, when our child asks for help, we explain something, she says the teacher explained it differently, but doesn't know how... because there is no textbook!!

At primary school it's not been anything over which to lose sleep, but in secondary it might be different.

• Is this really a trend all over the country?
• Across both private and public (we're not considering private, just curious)?
• I don't care whether the material is printed or online, but are students expected to revise based on the notes they take in class? Taking notes for a detailed history class might be harder than for a maths class. But how about subjects like biology, which require all kinds of graphs and images?
• What are your thoughts?
• Have you bought textbooks? How do your children revise?
• Getting rid of textbooks might be a way to cut on costs, but I suppose there is plenty of free material online to explain fractions logarithms WW1 etc

I know many people who are university lecturers, and they all tend to think this trend is a catastrophe, because by the time they start university students are not used to the concept of studying a textbook, they expect that anything can and should be summarised into a few bullet points on a slide.

But we are talking about young children, not about mathematicians taking graduate level calculus. Teachers would often expect exercises to be done in a certain way, even if multiple alternatives exist. I totally agree that there is benefit in teaching multiple ways, but it doesn't help much if the child cannot do it the way the teacher taught.

We were told this by DC first primary school - that wasn't getting great Sats in maths.

We turned to a paid for on-line site - mathsfactor- that covered "new methods" and ways DH and I had learnt logically working though them. Worked well for them - they just went though the levels at their own pace little and often and school did it's thing in their hours.

It was a bit worrying when we had few teachers say we don't understand what they did but they got the right answer - once they got to specialist maths teachers in secondary that stopped happening.

My parents were told similar with reading - and ended up with two struggling readers and they ignored it with third child.

TBH with pretty much everything we ended up doing this - find a program to work though with maths, reading. spelling and handwriting going though it and then on top reading or watching stuff round topic area.

Rarely saw their primary school work 5 minutes before a parent teacher meeting all their books to flip though - occasionally seeing their work on a wall. Similar with secondary reports here are two letter and a one or two word comment - we have to rely on the kids saying they are struggling or seeing predicted grades drop and then stepping in.

"You're clearly not a teacher - the skill of the teacher when it comes to revision can't be underestimated here. You can have as many textbooks as you like but if you learn the wrong material or you don't under the assessment objectives of the exam you will get a poor mark or possibly even fail."

@Ladybowes Correct, I am not a teacher.
I'll admit I am not sure I follow your point.
Is there anything specific you disagree on?

I don't think I ever downplayed the importance of teachers, nor did I ever imply that a good textbook is more important than a good teacher.

I was simply saying that the work of a good teacher can be completed by having clarity on where to find material to revise the concepts explained by the teacher; whether this material is online or printed is irrelevant.
Again, I don't like the approach I have seen in some cases of: "if you want to revise it's your job to find which of the many online or printed resources you want to use"

Its not about the materials as such it is about the make up of the class.
Every lesson has to be a bespoke lesson to the ability of the class including SEND, G&T, EAL, FSM (yup even that one) and grades from U - 9.

ParentOfOne

As has been posted textbooks are expensive,
They also get damaged very easily.
Most teachers will find a way around it, from photocopying to scanning.

@ParentOfOne I was attempting to answer some of your questions, particularly how students revise. Teachers should be supporting learners to revise - they might suggest resources that would be supportive and a good secondary will have access to many websites that support children learning and revision. Textbooks are largely digital for many good reasons and I'm not quite sure what your point is now?

Also in most good secondary students get topic organisers which are very useful and often contain a list of what students need to learn. There will be most likely links to digital textbooks - which in most cases you can buy hard copies of - however, many of the digital books have links to websites and other resources which are not available if you just have the hard copy.

When you get to secondary there will come a point when you might not necessarily be able to support your child in what the teacher has been explaining in class - my advice for what it's worth, is to support them in becoming confident enough to ask questions in class, to seek clarification on things they don't understand.

@FrippEnos I get it that textbooks are expensive. But aren't there enough free resources online? Couldn't teachers say: "website X is very similar to what we have been doing while Y follows a rather different approach"? Are these lessons so intimately bespoke and customised that no resource exists to which students and parents can be pointed?

A quick search on fractions for primary school gives me:
https://thirdspacelearning.com/blog/fractions-ks2/
https://mathsnoproblem.com/en/approach/fractions
https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/maths/primary-fractions/fractions-year-2-age-6-7/
https://emile-education.com/fractions-tips-and-activities-worksheets/

A quick search on logarithms for secondary schools gives me:
https://mathcentre.ac.uk/resources/uploaded/mc-ty-logarithms-2009-1.pdf
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zn3ty9q/revision/1
https://www.highermathematics.co.uk/exponentials-logs/

Crawling through all the stuff online can be time-consuming; also, not every child or parent has the maturity / knowledge to understand which material can be best suited

@Ladybowes Thank you. So, if I understand correctly, you are saying that in secondary schools there tends to be a bit more guidance from the teachers on where to find material (whether online or printed) to revise, compared to primary school? If so, that's reassuring.

And teachers don't have time to trawl through endless websites either! Textbooks are very expensive -£24 a copy in my subject. Electronic versions cost ££££££ a year and in my subject, instead of buying CDs for the listening resources (which used to cost hundreds anyway as they could be copied) publishers came up with wheeze of charging hundreds per year for subscriptions to them instead. It costs therefore ££££ a year just for digital access before you think about hard copies- which the kids draw on and generally treat v badly!

@ParentOfOne absolutely - especially the good ones. Many also pay for the subscriptions for online revision resources - and there are many free ones which schools know about and should advise parents and students about. When your visiting secondaries if you haven't already you can ask them about this.

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.

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.

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.

I'd be curious to understand if there are different pedagogic approaches and different pedagogic studies reaching different conclusions on this.
Or if it was mostly driven by the need to cut costs.

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.

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

@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.

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.

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.

@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 :))

Please forgive the off-topic, but this reminded me of the Simpsons episode where Lisa steals the teachers editions of the textbooks, and the teachers are unable to teach any more... :)

https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/Teacher%27s_Edition

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.

@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.

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.

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.