Imagine two history teachers, planning GCSE lessons side by side. One of them is using the department’s recommended textbook; the other is devising a lesson based around a current news hook that has historical implications. The first teacher plans quickly; the basis for the starter, key information, the discussion activity and independent writing task can all be drawn from the textbook, so it’s not long before she can move on to her marking, which takes up the rest of her planning, preparation and assessment session.

The second teacher, however, spends a much larger chunk of the session planning - creating original resources that she knows her students will respond well to but leaving herself little time to catch up on much else. Which of them has the best approach?

Fifty years ago, the answer would have been obvious: the textbook approach would have been seen as clearly more efficient. Fast-forward to 2017, though, and the situation had changed. The alternative approach had won out for most in the profession. Textbooks were no longer a politically neutral planning tool; they were the focus of a campaign spearheaded by Nick Gibb, then schools minister, to stamp out what he called an “anti-textbook ethos” in the profession.

Where did that “ethos” come from? Over several decades, the general teaching focus had gradually shifted to a more personalised approach. This led to teachers devising original lesson plans for every class, creating resources specifically tailored to their students - a process that, while time consuming, was thought by many to lead to better quality teaching and learning. The textbook came to be seen as the antithesis of this approach: a fixed, one-size-fits-all teaching tool.

Indeed, in a survey conducted by Tes and YouGov in 2017, just one in 10 teachers said they were using textbooks in more than half of their lessons - a drop from 13 per cent three years earlier. At that point, the decline looked set to continue, with just 8 per cent of the teachers surveyed predicting that they would be using textbooks in most or all of their lessons by 2020.

But there is some evidence that this further decline never occurred and that, actually, textbook use is on the rise. Research from Public First, published this year, suggests that teachers now “largely agree” that high-quality textbooks can provide a good foundation for curriculum structure and offer a familiar routine to students in lessons.

So, why have views changed? Growing awareness of the serious workload crisis that the profession is facing is one key reason. The most recent teacher workload survey, in 2019, found that teachers “still felt they spent too much time on planning”. For many, textbooks are a sensible way to release some of the pressure. According to the Public First research, the main reason that teachers gave for using paid-for resources, including textbooks, was to ease their workload.

Curriculum coherence

But it isn’t workload alone that is driving the uptick in use. Another part of the appeal of textbooks is that they can be useful in ensuring coherence in the curriculum (and meeting Ofsted’s curriculum requirements at the same time).

Speaking at an online seminar on textbooks, co-hosted by Tes and Public First, earlier this year, John Blake - a former history teacher who is currently head of public affairs and engagement at Ark Schools - explained how textbooks can bring coherence to the logistical side of planning, with the current focus on curriculum in mind.

“What ends up happening [without a textbook] is that you can cobble together all sorts of things off the internet [to produce a lesson plan] but then, actually, that lesson doesn’t speak to the next lesson…or the lesson that your predecessors [taught these same children] last year, or three years ago, four years ago,” he said, adding that this can mean that the “coherence of the curriculum…can fall apart”.

Schools are “the only place in which you can encounter a subject in ever-increasing levels of complexity over an extended period of time”, he continued. “If every teacher is planning their own thing and those building blocks are not being built on, actually what you get is a sort of frisson of the teacher creativity at the expense of structured coherence in the students’ understanding.”

This doesn’t mean that students won’t be able to put all those different things together, Blake added, but it could mean that “the schema they end up with is unintentional and often erroneous, rather than one that has been structured and speaks to a kind of professional coherence across time”. The latter result, goes the argument, is one you will more likely achieve through the use of a good-quality textbook.

Of course, the pandemic has assisted things here. The need for a tool that provides consistency and coherence across the curriculum has arguably become more obvious in recent months. During periods of lockdown, teachers reported that they found it particularly difficult to align remote learning with their school’s curriculum.

In a survey of just over 1,000 teachers, carried out by Ofsted and YouGov in November and December 2020, 49 per cent of respondents said that they had found this “quite difficult” or “very difficult”.

Again, textbooks were presented as a solution. The Royal Society of Edinburgh - together with its expert group on science, technology, engineering and maths education, the Learned Societies’ Group - penned an open letter to the Scottish Parliament’s Education and Skills Committee advising teachers not to overlook “good-quality textbooks” to support home learning.

In the letter, they explained that there is evidence to suggest that such print resources are “more effective tool[s] for providing and improving learning” than increasing access to digital tools.

There are lots of good reasons for using textbooks, then, but the argument has by no means been won. There are still significant barriers to their use in schools.

For example, the Public First research reveals that widespread stigma about the use of textbooks remains.

Charlotte Hawthorne, a deputy head of maths, who was speaking at the same event as Blake, points out that this stigma partly comes from the idea that you will be judged as a bit of a slacker for using textbooks rather than creating your own resources.

“When I first started teaching [about 10 years ago], it certainly felt like…we were not to use textbooks…because it might be seen as us being a bit lazy, that we weren’t really putting a lot of effort into [our] teaching,” she says.

Even if a teacher gets over this psychological hurdle, though, there are other issues. For instance, textbooks can be prohibitively expensive. Some teachers also point to issues around textbook quality and longevity.

However, according to Public First, the biggest barrier to extensive textbook use is teachers’ need for “differentiation and professional autonomy”.

For decades, a tenet of teaching has been that to ensure every child can achieve, work should be differentiated to match their attainment level and interests. While many have pushed for a different approach in the past few years - one whereby every child has the same work set for them but some may be provided with more of a scaffold than others - for many in the profession, the differentiation approach is deeply embedded. A textbook appears to dictate a method that makes such an approach incredibly difficult.

Another tenet is that teachers should be fully in control of the learning so that teaching can be responsive to what is happening in front of them. Again, a textbook is often perceived as incompatible with this ideal.

For Liz Hawker, a special educational needs and disability (SEND) specialist based in Kent, the differentiation angle is certainly a concern. While there are some benefits to using textbooks for pupils with SEND - she says they can be “invaluable for pupils with organisational difficulties, for example” - there are also negatives.

“Text [in textbooks] tends to be dense (difficult for those with dyslexia and visual stress); layouts can also be cluttered and distracting, with attention-grabbing graphics that are unhelpful for pupils with ADD [attention deficit disorder], ADHD [attention deficit hyperactivity disorder] and ASD [autism spectrum disorders],” she explains.

“For pupils with dyslexia and visual stress, font size, font type and spacing are almost invariably problematic, adding additional strain to the tough task of reading.”

Teachers also need to consider the impact of textbooks on those with physical difficulties, she adds. “Textbooks are also heavy. Pupils with physical disabilities or fatigue may struggle to carry them around during the school day, and those with organisational difficulties often forget them and rely on spare copies beyond your budget.”

What about the concern over professional autonomy? Mark Enser, head of geography and research lead at Heathfield Community College, in East Sussex, recently wrote about booklets - resources that are “a cross between a textbook and a workbook”, created in-house by departments - and he explained that there is a risk that such resources can lead to less responsive teaching.

“My concern is that if everything is prepared in a booklet, months in advance, how locked in will I be to these plans? Will there be a reticence to update schemes of work or change lesson plans, due to the amount of work and money that has gone into producing these booklets?” he wrote. Enser acknowledges that there are differences between how textbooks and booklets are used in schools.

“No one expects [textbooks] to provide everything you need to teach your curriculum. For example, we might use the information in a textbook if it is relevant to the lesson but we rarely use the activities. We also expect to have to find supplementary information elsewhere”, he says.

However, he believes that the “potential pitfalls are the same” for booklets and textbooks, as both lend themselves to being used “in an unresponsive manner”.

He urges caution, too, about the workload issue: “It worries me that textbooks are being presented not as helpful resources for teachers to use in their own curriculum but as a solution to the problems of poor staff retention and a lack of teacher expertise,” he says. “We need to address these systematic problems and not turn textbooks into a sticking plaster.”

But are the textbooks themselves to blame for all the concerns listed here? Or is the problem more to do with how they are being deployed? Christian Bokhove, associate professor in mathematics education at the University of Southampton, believes that it comes down to the latter.

“What I find really surprising is that teachers in England very much think that they need to reinvent the wheel, that they need to put in extra effort for the lessons - and they feel if it’s already all sorted in a book, then they’re not really doing their job right. They feel they are being stifled in their freedom and creativity,” he says. “[But] in my view, if you’ve got a solid textbook, then there’s absolutely no reason to assume that you’re not still in control.”

Sophie Hallum Barnard, assistant headteacher of Brighton Hill Community School in Hampshire, agrees. “There is nothing inherently ‘bad’ about the use of textbooks; they can, in fact, support a curriculum very well - but ‘support’ is the operative word here: a textbook shouldn’t be the curriculum, in my view,” she says.

Of course, textbook quality is key. As Hallum Barnard points out, the “usefulness” of textbooks can “vary hugely based on both their quality and the way in which they are used in lessons”.

So, what makes a good textbook? Finding a consensus about this is difficult, not least because research in this area is vanishingly small. According to Bokhove, the fact that “[textbook] quality needs to be OK is one of those things that is obviously true but not everyone agrees on its features”.

However, he suggests that “firstly, [a good textbook] probably needs to have sufficient, correct subject knowledge, mapped to the curriculum”. Then “it needs instructional sections, plenty of space for practice but also space for more extensive thinking”.

“All this should be sequenced in such a way that themes and topics are also revisited after a while. Nowadays, ideally, [there should also be] a ‘digital’ layer that supports a book,” he adds.

Of course, there will be an element of subjectivity around what makes a good textbook - not to mention variation in opinion between subjects and between stages. But suppose you have found what you consider to be a high-quality textbook for your subject and age group. How do you go about using that textbook effectively?

Bokhove advises using the textbook at a department level, to inform curriculum planning. “If it is a basis to plan your teaching then it can work well,” he says.

“It’s also quite convenient for a department. It’s a relatively easy way of planning to say, ‘the next two weeks, we’re going to do chapter three from this particular book’, compared with collecting and assembling a set of worksheets or writing your own textbook.”

Professional autonomy

However, he stresses that this doesn’t mean that teachers need to let go of their professional autonomy.

“I think that’s a fear that many teachers have; that we’re going to be this uniform set of robots that just deliver the contents of the book, when really it can be very loose.”

This more flexible use of the textbook is in evidence at Brighton Hill, where some subjects rely on textbooks as a base. “In some subjects, such as modern foreign languages, we do use textbooks as a starting point for our curriculum,” explains Hallum Barnard.

But this is just “a starting point that we build from, enriching the curriculum with more interactive and cultural learning that is beyond the remit of the textbook”.

She adds that as the “experts in their subjects”, it is the heads of faculty who make decisions about which resources are used. “We wouldn’t have a situation whereby senior leaders in the school would insist on textbooks being used,” she says.

Danielle Lewis-Egonu, executive headteacher at the Galaxy Trust of five primary schools in Kent, agrees that senior leaders need to facilitate that flexibility.

“We are very encouraging of teachers if they want to make things from scratch all the time - that’s entirely up to them,” she says.

However, she also points out that senior leaders have to “bear in mind the workload of teachers” - and this means they might sometimes need to step in and have a quiet word with a subject lead who is not addressing a workload issue.

When it comes to SEND, some of the concerns mentioned earlier can also be overcome by good practice. For example, to overcome issues around the density of text or cluttered layout, Hawker suggests that “covering parts of the page you don’t need to see with a plain white sheet can help”, and that “expanding the electronic version on a tablet and blocking out the rest” is even better.

So, is it simply a case of textbooks having a right time and place - as opposed to the extreme views that their use should be all or nothing?

Hallum Barnard thinks so. She points out that while good-quality textbooks “can certainly save time in planning and searching for suitable resources”, in her view “they should only be used where they can offer material which meets the needs of the curriculum, rather than the curriculum becoming distorted by using textbooks which ‘more or less’ have material linked to the intended learning outcomes.”

She adds that “quality of resources which support the curriculum should come first”, whether those resources are a class set of textbooks or something else entirely.

Enser agrees with her. “I definitely think that textbooks have a role to play in school - they are a repository of materials that are useful when teaching (text, images, graphs, maps, etc),” he says.

“However, unless we introduce a true national curriculum that specifies not only what has to be taught but also how it should be taught, I can’t see textbooks playing a more major role for many subjects where those discussions over curriculum content and pedagogy are still taking place.”

So, thinking back to the two history teachers I mentioned at the start of the article, which of them is taking the better approach?

The answer may be both of them - depending on the pupils they are teaching, the context they are working in and how that textbook is being used.

Chris Parr is a freelance journalist

This article originally appeared in the 22 October 2021 issue under the headline “Can a textbook make you a better teacher?”