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The prospect of five years of majority Conservative government may have filled some with gloom, but for educational publishers at least, it signifies a certain degree of breathing space after hectic times.
As Colin Hughes, Collins Learning m.d. and chair of the Publishers Association’s Educational Publishers Council (EPC), puts it: “Michael Gove [the former education secretary] uprooted the curriculum, and to use his word—and actually I agree with him on this—upgraded the curriculum very significantly. That’s great, and it’s been done, and his immediate successors are not going to revisit that and go through it all again.
“Curriculum change creates commercial opportunity, but particularly this last phase of curriculum change [this autumn sees the introduction of a range of new GCSEs, AS- and A-Levels] was really quite difficult. In most cases we knew the changes only a few months before we had [to have] published products to deliver—materials were turned around in a breathtakingly short space of time. That is not the best way to do it.”
The Tory majority means that if current education secretary Nicky Morgan or her minister Nick Gibb states that something is a priority, it is now a reasonable bet that the policy will be followed through in the next few years. Hughes says it “creates a certain clarity—and that’s a good thing. Whether that’s precisely our agenda or not is neither here nor there. We know that’s the agenda.”
A post-election meeting with Gibb has already taken place and it is clear that the minister’s declared focus on the importance of textbooks in teaching will continue. Publishers have welcomed Gibb’s recent emphasis on the value of textbooks, after years when the textbook lacked champions, but there was controversy at last autumn’s PA/British Educational Suppliers annual conference, when the minister lambasted what he perceived as the poor quality of UK publishers’ work when compared to some overseas rivals.
Hughes admits that there was “a barney, a frank exchange” between the minister and publishers. “He’s said that [UK textbooks are not world class], we’ve argued that’s not the case. He’s said, ‘Here are some textbooks that aren’t very good,’ we’ve said, ‘We don’t think they’re representative’.”
The net result has been educational publishers—inherently a highly competitive breed—agreeing to work together to spell out exactly what is a good textbook in the core subject areas. Commissioning editors, authors and subject specialists from across a range of publishing companies are now at work on sets of guidelines, with the first ones expected to be published early this autumn.
Hughes says that although there has been dialogue with ministerial advisers, Gibb does not get to ratify the guidelines. “They are being produced by us, for publishers . . . but it’s indicative of the educational publishing industry saying, ‘We’re willing to engage in a process where we all agree that yes, each textbook publisher will do things slightly differently, but there is a quality level below which none of us should fall, and this is what it looks like’.”
He adds: “Perhaps surprisingly, it’s not been difficult to get everybody working together on this project, and that’s great. Fingers crossed we get to the right place. None of this is done yet, but the early signs are pretty good.”
The Collins Learning m.d. is very clear on the value of having the minister’s support of the textbook as a key tool in education. “What would be great for us is if we could get the pendulum to swing back to textbooks . . . Nobody serious is in the marketplace any more with a purely print product, we’re all out there with a mix of print and digital, but the print textbook remains at the heart of it, and it’s a great thing for us if we can have a government across the next three or four years supporting the idea that schools can support that sort of resource. If we wanted to be whingey, we could say, ‘Why is it that we spend twice as much of the schools budget paying for examination?’—roughly £300m on examination and £150m on resources. We obviously believe—and we’re very glad to have an administration that clearly agrees—that we should be spending much more on resourcing classrooms.”
Ministerial support is crucial for the important export market too, Hughes argues: “We don’t want government ministers saying, ‘If you want to buy a really good maths textbook, you should be going somewhere else.’ That’s not a good place to be. We need people who want to buy our services or skills in the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, to be hearing that our own administration in this country thinks we’re the bee’s knees. We might think that, but it doesn’t half help if [Gibb] is saying it.”
Another development seemingly on the government’s agenda concerns the move to a single exam board, floated in a Mail on Sunday article last month. This could happen in one of two ways, explains Hughes: either the government decides on the exam to be set, say English GCSE, and all the existing boards bid to be the single deliverer of it, like any other government tendering process; or the separate private exam boards—AQA, OCR, Pearson-owned Edexcel, and WJEC—could be scrapped altogether, with the government setting exams, as happens in some other countries.
Hughes says of the former: “As you know, Michael Gove was quite keen on this, for very good reasons in my opinion, but he backed off because actually to go down that road involves a fairly significant set-to with the exam boards . . . From a publishing perspective, and an education perspective, there is a strong argument for saying, ‘There shall be one exam board and let a thousand publishing flowers bloom’. If that prevails in this country, I think we will be in a very good place—but that’s a personal view, not an EPC view.”
The most fraught aspect of the examination mechanism, as far as publishers are concerned, is whether an exam board is allowed to endorse a particular publisher. Again, Hughes has to speak in a personal capacity, because educational publishers are split on the issue. “If you have one exam board and it endorses one, two or three textbook schemes, then that exam board has an interest in making sure that publisher is simply supporting that syllabus. Nick Gibb wants textbooks that do more than [prepare pupils for] the exam . . . I think it’s healthy that we’ve got [the issue] up and out there, it means the educational world is looking at the actual delivery of the curriculum, rather than the servicing of exams. That’s what publishers should focus on. There’s been a risk in the system that’s grown up in the past couple of decades, that it sometimes tends more to us delivering a particular examination system.”
The key is dialogue with the government, he stresses. “As an industry, we all want to be actively engaged in the process of raising standards. Whether the government is traditionalist Tory or left wing, it shouldn’t matter to us too much where they are coming from, the question is, ‘What we can do to help raise standards?’ I don’t think it’s all going to be smooth sailling.
“I think we are going to have arguments with the government, but that is also good. The important thing is to be an active player. We want to support as much as possible, and be dictated to as little as possible. That’s why it’s quite important that we adopt a positive attitude.”