The Bookseller.com

21st November 2008

Victoria Arnstein is supplements editor of The Bookseller.

Back to school

12.06.08

The schools market is a hard one to keep pace with, making the job of publishers difficult as they look ahead and try to predict developments in the curriculum and align their schedules to match.  

This year changes will be taking place right across the board, from early years right through to educational provision for 14-to-19 year olds. The Early Years Foundation Stage Framework, which takes effect in September, will bring in a single framework for the care and education of children up to the age of five. This brings two potential opportunities for publishers: new books aimed at the carers who will have to implement the framework and resources targeted at the children themselves, writes Caroline Horn in this week's Bookseller Back to School supplement.  

Another change going on across the schools market is the move towards the wider use of digital content in classrooms. This has been partially driven by e-Learning Credits--government-funding that has been made available to schools since 2002 to help fund the purchase of e-learning resources, but which will be scrapped from August this year.

Hannah Davies explores whether the end of e-credits will halt the progress school publishers have been making on e-publishing so far. The Publishers Association's Graham Taylor, for example calls for schools to "make proper allocations out of their own budgets" for multimedia sources. "The irony is," says Taylor, "this might actually improve the market".

The supplement also explores what is going on in schools and local authorities around the country around the National Year of Reading and takes a look at poetry publishing for schools. Children's laureate Michael Rosen and others lament the dearth of new poetry coming onto the market--especially single poet volumes--and ask what can be done to encourage publishers to print more poetry titles. 

We also have, of course, the preview of school titles coming out over the next six months written by Tamara Macfarlane from the children's bookshop, Tales on Moon Lane, and our charts pages where Philip Stone, the Bookseller's charts editor, examines the books and brands that have been performing well during the last twelve months.