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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

"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

This is beyond horrific.

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.

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

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.

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

Ireland's gross domestic product is misleadingly high because Ireland hosts a number of multination which set up shop there because it's a tax haven stealing tax revenue from the rest of the continent of the very competitive tax regime. In fact, the European Court of Justice has now ruled that Apple must pay back a truckload of taxes https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgwkwxr4eqo

To make a somewhat similar example, the City of London (as in, the square mile) has incredibly high crime rate per resident. Is it more dangerous than Caracas? No, it's just that very few people live there while many people work there Monday to Friday.

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

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").

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

And this is sixth form?

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!