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.

OK, I have been enjoyably schooled on macroeconomics. Let me try on micro - this argument about paying for textbooks. Why is the taxpayer shelling out for Oak Academy for example rather than contracting with a publisher directly? We could be the monopsony buyer couldn't we? (I know, different boards, academies etc - but even academies might choose a DfE £7 textbook over a £40 one? )

@Corksoles there's no profit for anyone other than taxpayer to do so :) and taxpayer has no say in it.
Also there's a lot of profit for many in keeping it as it is.

In general, when UK government call other goverments corrupt, it now makes me smile. If smth is legal doesn't mean it's fine.

Imagine how much money every trust spends for various subscriptions to very primitive apps. Why government not just buy the apps or make their own?

Oh @Corksoles that is far too sensible to catch on!

Also DfES can't supply enough teachers, so I don't know if I'd trust them with books tbh.

Here is a stat for you.

There are more teachers who are women aged 30-39 than there are male teachers total.

20,000 of those women leave teaching every year, many citing the difficulty of combining the job with looking after their own children.

That is more teachers than the amount by which DfES has missed its recruitment targets for the last couple of years.

Anyway, back to the books!

Gosh @Malbecfan that sounds great.

I would have loved that for Music A-level.

Government IT projects have a great history, of course...

Why on earth would I teach my students how to use a textbook when we don't have textbooks?

Is anyone asking you to @MrsHamlet?

Opinions vary but for my part I think it's still a useful skill to be able to use a reference book. We do have some class sets mostly used for cover. Students can buy their own copy should they wish. A few do.

Online sources can be great but you don't always know who writes them. And quite a few of the sites that are useful for my subject have a hefty price tag.

If ofsted has suddenly rediscovered a love for textbooks, I can foresee schools getting downgraded because they don't have them or enough of them.
And whilst we all know that ofsted isn't worth the paper that the grades are written on it will be by their measure that schools get shit upon.

My DC has just started Latin at (state) secondary and it's really weird, no textbooks, just printouts from the teacher. Luckily, DC immediately noticed the printouts are from the same 80s edition of the Cambridge Latin Course I still have on our bookshelves and has been enjoying reading ahead of the lessons.

It's so unusual to use dictionaries these days, but I'm going to try to get DC using my old Latin dictionary and grammar books, too.

Kennedy's Shorter Latin Primer must have been one of the best value textbooks ever. I think the copy I had at school (which they provided) had been in use for decades. My father had it in his school days, my grandmother taught with it as a teacher. (I was an Ecce Romani girl rather than Cambridge, though.)

@Chipsintheair May I ask if your child studied grammar properly in the previous years?

In my (arguably limited) experience this is another difference vs some foreign education systems, and it is probably also a reason why some native speakers make mistakes which many foreigners don't, like confusing it's (verb) with its (possessive adjective or pronoun). Many English kids don't even learn what possessive pronouns are...

Anyway I am curious because I wonder how one can study Latin without a proper foundation of grammar

Issues with textbooks (in my experience and in my subject):

• curriculum changes mean they're out of date quickly and they cannot be repurposed
• changes in the ways things are taught and what we are teaching mean that texts quickly become out of date (I.e. we are consciously making an effort to include new texts and avoid exclusively dead white male authors)
• students deface, graffiti on and destroy books. Parents refuse to pay invoices for damage.
• when books go home they rarely come back. If they do they often have artistic "additions" or missing sections
• they are EXPENSIVE. Let's say I hypothetically purchase this book (www.brownsbfs.co.uk/Product/Webb-Jennifer/Oxford-Revise-AQA-GCSE-English-Language-Complete-Revision-and-Practice/9781382039802) for all of KS4. There needs to be enough for students to take one home, and they need one in Y10 and 11. So at any given time that's, say, 500 books. It's £7.69 with schools' discount. And let's say they're being generous and give an additional 10% discount.

That's £3400+ on books.

If they don't all come back, let's say another £700 on replacements each year.

And then consider the budget for everything else - including ALL the other books that students are reading in class, because we can't ask students to provide their own copies.

I also don't like teaching to a textbook - I want the flexibility and scope to be creative

@Evvyjb Cost is definitely an issue. But there are also many free resources online for many subjects.

What subject do you teach and at what level? I'll confess I do not get this point about the curriculum changing too quickly. Sure, for some subjects (like the pre-Brexit economics textbooks). But Pythagoras' theorem, the times tables and the conjugation of verbs have not changed much over the last decades, last I checked.

How do you balance the fact that there will never be a textbook which matches 100% the exact same precise way you want to teach a topic, with the fact that it is beneficial for students to have some kind of resource (it doesn't matter whether written by the teacher or someone else, printed or online) to go back to and revise?

I am not a fan of teachers saying: look it up yourselves online or go to the local library (if one still exists!).

I am not a fan of students frantically taking extremely detailed notes: they may not concentrate on the explanations, the notes can be incomplete, etc.

Do you hand out any material yourself?
But then is it not a bit of waste of time to have, I don't know, 60 thousand secondary maths teachers each writing and sharing their notes on logarithms etc?

"That's £3400+ on books"
Just think of how many more books academies could buy if their CEOs (why the censored do school academies even have CEOs???) weren't paid £200k+ - while ppay for the teachers doing the actual teaching stagnates
https://schoolsweek.co.uk/rise-in-200k-academy-trust-ceos-as-pay-stagnation-ends/#:~:text=Forty%2Dfour%20academy%20trust%20CEOs,now%20earn%20over%20%C2%A3300%2C000.

@ParentOfOne English, y7-13 - I upload all the resources I create, plus revision guides etc, onto the student accessible areas on teams. There are copies of every lesson on there. We centralise planning so all teachers are delivering the same material and resources are uploaded centrally for students.

In the last 8 years, English GCSE has had an entirely new curriculum, the ks3 levels have been scrapped, and we are (rightly) trying to move away from texts which are just by and about white men.

English is not a solely knowledge based curriculum, which is why many of the arguments for "powerful knowledge", retrieval, Gradgrind-esque "Facts!" don't really work. Textbooks included, useful as they might be if you want a "one stop shop"

You can't. I was an Ecce Romani girl too and rest assured, there was plenty of grammar in that. I believe the Cambridge Latin Course tried the then modish approach of not bothering much about grammar when it was first introduced in the 1970s but rapidly had to revert to a more old-fashioned approach.

@Evvyjb So you still provide some material for the students to go back to and revise, right? My issue is with the school and teachers who do not.

May I ask, how much, in your experience, grammar is still taught in secondary schools? I have often had to correct awful grammar mistakes from very young hires which left me quite baffled.

What do you mean by and about white men? I hope you get the balance of inclusiveness right and do not end up with woke indoctrination. There are woke nutjobs (and I say this as someone who has always voted Labour) who think Shakespeare should no longer be studied because he wasn't that good a writer anyway. The usual nutjobs who cannot contextualise anything and who act surprised that individuals and events dating back centuries ago would be perceived differently with today's moral standards. Quoting from a book:

one Dr. Vanessa Corredera from Andrew University in Michigan claimed that all of Shakespeare’s plays are “race plays” and contain “racialized dynamics.” By Dr. Corredera’s standards, it was clear that Shakespeare is a very sloppy writer. Talking about A Midsummer Night’s Dream , she said, “In context with other plays and even the Sonnets, this language is all over the place, this language of dark and light . . . these are racializing elements.”

I'm a Shakespeare/early modern drama specialist by background - there's Shakespeare every year! But I also want a curriculum that links the lives of the students in my classroom to literature and then traces those threads of common humanity all the way back.

I do NOT want to be teaching Victorian attitudes to physiognomy and evil in a classroom with disabled children when there are alternatives with just as much literary value and perhaps more resonance with their lives. I do not want every work by someone who is not white or male to be about the struggles of being not white or not male!

I want to teach The Tempest and explore the different ways of reading Caliban, rather than "he is the villain and Prospero was trying his best with savages" and look at The Merchant of Venice critically, exploring the problematic nature of what is done to and by Shylock, and why his speech is radically egalitarian. The way we read and interpret English is evolving all the time and a textbook means that students (and staff) are more likely to rely on the "views of a moment" which actually can be improved upon and explored in a more varied and nuanced way.

(Gets off soapbox and goes back to marking essays from a brand new poetry anthology which is not included in any textbooks and will be on the exam papers from this summer)

@Evvyjb It sounds like your lessons would be really interesting, well done!

@ParentOfOne

You mention inability to contextualise. How true that is. I think the ubiquity of the internet and google as a 'research' method has a lot to do with it. Facts are too easily presented with little or no context.

This is especially true of historical and literary subjects and in turn this has led to an inability to think critically and deeply, and embrace nuance.At its extreme a fact can be truth because I have said so. This is deeply dangerous and I fear AI will only intensify it.

It is an unpopular view but I am wholly against the removal or vandalising of statues of those who no longer fit the latest image of what is acceptable. Context is all. The more I think about it the darker the implications become, frankly.

Admittedly I was probably an outlier and fortunately went to a very good school.When I was a child I immersed myself in classical literature. Shakespeare's plays shed light on a world long gone, yet his themes are universal. Dickens revealed the miseries of the urban Victorian poor. Hardy thrilled me with his vivid descriptions of rural life in 19th century Dorset.

At university, the novels of 19th century women writers revealed yet more depth and interest.

So much richness to be experienced and I fear it is all being lost.

One can surely do several things at once: present the work in its original context AND discuss how its themes are still relevant today.

I do understand, although rarely approve of, the modern urge to re imagine the classics but some attempts are so jejune and laughable they defeat the point.

It is surely a mistake to think that children can only relate to something only if it is familiar. Minds should be broadened.

Teacher - we tend to use a textbook in languages but sometimes the schemes of work set by schools go beyond the textbook or don't follow the same order. Schools I've worked in usually give children printed (in books) and digital copies of knowledge organisers that they can use to revise. We also sell subsided revision guides and workbooks and give revision plans on how to use these, links to past papers or other online resources. We also give the children printed vocabulary lists and sentence builders to practise with, these would also be in their books. There's a big emphasis on presentation which we monitor so students can actually revise from books if they choose to.

It's definitely a cost thing in part, we can barely afford printing let alone buying every child a textbook.

Secondly, the textbook alone is not enough to teach every child. We might use independent exercises from it, especially skills based ones, but end up adding a lot of extra help and practice to help students understand, master and memorise the key concepts and skills.

I graduated in the mid noughteens and we weren't using textbooks at university either. We had one book with exercises and explanations that helped learn a language from scratch but had moved on from it by our final year. Mostly it was about finding academic journals and other publications in the library.

You could definitely ask your child's teachers which revision resources they recommend, it's still helpful to know the exam board for GCSE, but I think most teachers would have better suggestions for resources than a textbook. (Edit: in particular, anything that involves students actually practising or creating something - exam questions, exercises, mind maps, flashcards, creating a quiz with questions and answers. Reading and highlighting is basically pointless in terms of understanding and long term memory)

@ridl14 's final 2 sentences are probably the most pertinent in this thread, namely that reading a textbook is a poor method of revising.

When I was at school, we hadn't learned grammar beyond the basics (the difference between it's and its is very basic and should be learned by about age 6, so that's probably to do with the individuals in question, rather than the curriculum!). We learned grammar through learning Latin at my (private) secondary school, as primary schools didn't teach much back then.

Nowadays, primary schools teach quite a sophisticated level of grammar and are tested on it in year 6 SATS, so it should be quite an easy transition into learning Latin. It's new learning declension of nouns and conjugation of verbs, but some concepts, such as agreement between adjectives and nouns, have already been learned in Spanish at primary school.

"(the difference between it's and its is very basic and should be learned by about age 6, so that's probably to do with the individuals in question, rather than the curriculum!)"
In theory! The practice seems to be quite different

@Malbecfan " reading a textbook is a poor method of revising"

@ridl14 "Reading and highlighting is basically pointless in terms of understanding and long term memory)"

The point of a textbook or of any kind of material is not that you read it, highlight it and then you're done. It's that it is often beneficial to go back to a source which reports the topic you are studying. Being used to studying only on notes and slides is a dangerous trend. Not everything can, nor should, be summarised into bullet points.

I was speaking to two university lecturers of scientific subjects, one British, one foreign, who made this very point, and basically said that some British university students expect everything to be distilled down to power point friendly bullet points, and are in for a bit of shock when they realise this doesn't apply to every subject.

@ParentOfOne fine, unless what you are studying cannot easily be put into a textbook, like the examples I gave yesterday.

Several posters have explained why textbooks are not used in many subjects any more, citing various reasons including cost, weight, relevance, ever-changing exam specifications and the like. You seem to have an agenda about certain study, which may be true, but does not resonate with me or my recently graduated daughters (they are both Masters level STEM graduates). They do not and would never want information distilled down to bullet points. Why would you go back to only one source? Surely, you want to synthesise information to draw out relevant strands or themes from a variety of different perspectives.

I lead the EPQ in my school. There is (thankfully) no textbook. It would be impossible to produce one as the projects I supervise, mark and moderate are so diverse. We teach the skills of reading widely from accredited sources - e.g. Google Scholar as opposed to normal Google, journals, open source information etc. - evaluating those sources as to their provenance, bias and utility, and drawing together the information they contain before reaching a conclusion. Universities seem to really like this and many including RG institutions lower offers if students achieve A star or A grades.