Ministers urge schools to bring back traditional textbooks to end a growing reliance on worksheets and the internet.
They say that an “anti-textbook ethos” has contributed to England’s fall in international rankings of pupils’ performance in key academic subjects.
In a speech to the Publishers Association, School Reform Minister Nick Gibb called on all schools – both primary and secondary – to reintroduce good quality textbooks in most subjects. He complained that teachers too often neglected textbooks in favor of producing worksheets or “endlessly searching the internet” for suitable material for their lessons.
Mr Gibb said new research shows that teachers in top-performing countries are significantly more likely to use textbooks than in England. The research “should rightly send shockwaves through the education system and the publishing industry,” Mr Gibb said.
In Finland, 95 per cent of maths teachers use a textbook as a basis for lessons and in Singapore, the figure is 70 per cent. In contrast, only 10 per cent of maths teachers in England use a textbook for their core teaching – and only four per cent in science.
‘Study of these nations shows good teaching and high academic standards are strongly associated with adequate provision and widespread use of high quality textbooks,’ said Mr Gibb, ‘Once again England has fallen behind.’ He suggested that teacher trainers and researchers, rather than teachers themselves, are responsible for the marginalization of textbooks. He also laid down a challenge to educational publishers to drive up the quality of textbooks in England.
“For teachers, well-structured textbooks reduce workload,” he said, “for students, knowledge-rich textbooks mean they can read beyond the confines of the exam syllabus and using textbooks helps to develop those all-important scholarship skills; and for parents, textbooks are a guide to what their children are being taught in school. I would like to see all schools, both primary and secondary, using high quality textbooks in most academic subjects, bringing us closer to the norm in high performing countries.”
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