In 2014, Tim Oates released a policy paper entitled ‘Why Textbooks Count’. In this paper, Oates criticised the state of textbook publication in the UK, particularly in light of the perceived failure of books to develop coherent curriculum knowledge. This theme was also picked up by Nick Gibb in his speech to the BESA Conference in 2015. I am not going to go into depth on the merits or demerits of Oates’ and Gibb’s analyses here (although if you are interested, Ed Podesta produced a great series on this HERE) largely because I believe there are some awful things being done in the name of making textbooks ‘accessible’. However, I do not subscribe to the bleak view outlined in Oates’ and Peal’s upcoming talk, that textbooks are dreadful because they are knowledge-light, magazine-like, and demeaning of the past.
In this blog, I intend to directly address the content developed in various textbooks. I am including Peal’s series again here as it is one of the books which came out of Oates’ criticisms of books, and has been put forward as a solution to the problematic textbooks of old; a “renaissance of intellectually demanding and knowledge-rich textbooks in England's schools” as Gibb put it (Gibb in Oates, 2014).