When Franklin Watts started publishing in this country 30 years ago, children’s non-fiction was a more random, unstructured - and yes, dull - affair than it has since become.

Based in Hoxton, close to the Square Mile of London’s City, and with 200 new non-fiction titles to its name this year, Franklin Watts (part of the French publishing group, Hachette) has established itself as a leading publisher of children’s non-fiction, producing high-quality books that are closely tailored to today’s curriculum.

Philippa Stewart, the publishing director, started out 30 years ago at a rival firm, Wayland (now part of Hodder), and recalls how non-fiction was handled back then.

“The editor would give the author a word length, little more, and when the manuscript was delivered, it was treated very much as a sacrosanct entity. The publishing house didn’t really design the book, but sent it off to the printer with a pile of photographs.”

“And it showed!” says Linda Banner, Franklin Watts’ associate director for promotion and marketing. Thirty years ago, she was starting out as a librarian. “We would see these dreary books coming through, dense text and generally impenetrable - light years away from the kind of books produced now.”

The introduction of full-colour printing, from about 1974 onwards, brought a mini-explosion in non-fiction, and a sense of exuberance akin to the creative, child-centred teaching methods that were taking hold after the Plowden report (1967).

“Using colour was like an opening into another world,” remembers Philippa Stewart. “Suddenly, there were all sorts of things you could do - like a diagram of how a car worked, which would have been too dull in black and white.”

Gradually publishers began to think much harder about information skills, providing children with indexes and glossaries to help them get the most out of a book. They hired designers, and they began to structure their pages with a view to how best readers could navigate the information. They asked teachers to tell them what worked and what didn’t work.

The advent of the national curriculum in the late 1980s had something of a dampening effect - initially at least. “It was so prescriptive,” says Philippa Stewart. “You thought you could take book titles straight off the pages of the curriculum - but then you found that everybody else was doing the same thing. You had to be clever, you had to put a little extra something in. And there was the rather depressing realisation that books not related to the national curriculum were not going to sell.”

Natural history books, for instance, which had for years been a mainstay of educational publishing, were no longer in demand because they did not have an official slot in the curriculum.

Sue Jones, head of Hertfordshire Schools Library Service, supports the Franklin Watts list - “it’s very key, very crucial” - but is worried that educational publishing is too curriculum-focused: “There is less and less space for books on other things that children are interested in - such as hobbies or pets, or perhaps the bits of history that are not on the curriculum.”

But with ever-declining sales - from 25,000 copies of a successful non-fiction title in the mid-1970s to only 2,500 today - publishers such as Philippa Stewart argue that there is no room for trial and error: books must be absolutely right for the market and guaranteed to sell.

Every new educational initiative must be immediately scrutinised for its publishing potential. The literacy strategy prompted Franklin Watts to launch its highly popular History Diaries series: chatty, first-person accounts by a Victorian apprentice, a young West Indian immigrant, and a 1960s teenager, among others. It also quickly pounced on citizenship as a new subject that could highlight useful and relevant titles in this area.

Special needs, however, is another Franklin Watts trademark, and a less obviously remunerative one. The My Class series in the mid-1980s was hailed as ground-breaking for its inclusion of a girl in a wheelchair (not drawn attention to in the text). Franklin Watts then led the way with One World, a series showing the daily lives of children with disabilities; many other titles have followed, including books with differentiated levels of text - increasingly in demand - to help children with reading difficulties.

“Books like these have helped to bring children with special needs into the mainstream, giving them the opportunity to share their experience,” says Beverley Mathias at REACH (the National Advice Centre for Children with Reading Difficulties), which has been a consultant to the publisher.

The best way for a company like Franklin Watts to survive in a market of diminishing sales is to increase its market share, says Philippa Stewart. “There is still a good market for what we do, and there will continue to be, for the foreseeable future.”