Minister for School Standards hosted the first International
Textbook Summit in London on Thursday 14 June, bringing together
curriculum experts and teachers to discuss how to use textbooks
to improve education for every child and help tackle teacher
workload.
The Minister welcomed government representatives and
international experts from 15 nations including Finland,
Singapore and Germany to the Royal Society in London to share the
latest international evidence on textbooks and explore ways of
emulating the success of textbook based teaching programmes, such
as Teaching for Mastery.
Evidence suggests textbooks save teachers around 18 minutes a day
and high performing countries, including those in the Far East,
have a strong focus on textbooks to help raise education
standards.
The international symposium builds on the recent launch of
a £7.7 million curriculum
fund to support the development of high quality
resources. These resources will also help teachers deliver the
government’s new curriculum while freeing them up to focus on
what really matters in the classroom.
School Standards Minister said:
Textbooks support teachers to translate the vision of a
curriculum into carefully sequenced and well-resourced lessons,
reducing teacher workload and increasing the quality of
classroom teaching. That’s why we are encouraging the creation
of these resources through our £7.7 million curriculum fund.
It was an honour to host world-leading experts for this first
ever summit and to discuss how we can use these resources to
improve education for every child, building on the 1.9 million
more children now in good or outstanding schools than in 2010
thanks to the hard work of teachers and our reforms.
Tim Oates CBE from Cambridge Assessment said:
The Summit developed an extraordinary consensus about the value
and function of textbooks; the discussion of what ‘quality’
means will help with both new generations of textbooks and
allied digital resources.
The evidence of best practice and the discussions at the summit
will help to shape the development of resources as part of the
curriculum fund. It will also inform the development of the
department’s teacher recruitment and retention strategy which is
due to be published later this year.
The Education Secretary has been clear that there are no great
schools without great teachers and his top priority is to make
sure teaching remains an attractive and fulfilling profession –
removing unnecessary workload is at the heart of this commitment.
Also speaking at the event were: Tim Oates CBE, Cambridge
Assessment; Professor Bill Schmidt, Michigan State University;
Professor Dr Eckhardt Fuchs, Georg Eckert Institute for
International Textbook Research; Lee Fei Chen, Times Publishing
Limited; Rickard Vinde, Swedish Association of Educational
Publishers; Dr Nuno Crato, University of Lisbon; Debbie Morgan,
National Centre for the Excellence in Teaching Mathematics; and
Professor Xingfeng Huang, Shanghai Normal University.
International Textbook
Summit - 14 June 2018: summary document (PDF, 4.76MB, 11
pages)
Read ’s full speech here.
