Why Are Exercise Books Staying in Schools?

I have already mentioned Ofsted inspections in a previous post. Another perverse effect of the importance of these inspections is the issue with (exercise) books. When I was myself at school — and already at primary school — , I had different exercise books, often one per subject. The notebooks were an obvious learning tool, providing concrete elements of what had been done during the lesson, allowing students, when doing their homework, to go through the lesson content again and look at the exercises done and corrected in class. Also, homework was done in our exercise books. I would have thought this exercise book use is universal, and I hadn’t expected to find something else in England. Instead, exercise books are still used in England during the lesson, but they often remain at school. So, everything I have written above on why exercise books are useful doesn’t apply if they stay in the classroom.

I couldn’t understand this habit, so I asked some teachers at school. Their answer was along the lines of, “You cannot let students take their books home, because they won’t be able to take care of them. They will lose them and tell you the dog has eaten them. There is a big parenting problem in London.” I was shocked by these statements for various reasons. Firstly, it is also the role of school to teach children to take care of their exercise books. In other countries, they do it by giving primary children the responsibility of taking them home and bring them back to school. Of course, some books are forgotten, lost, damaged, but this is part of the learning process. I also found the allegation of bad parenting highly patronising and, at the same time, a sign of a given-up attitude, as if schools couldn’t even try to balance this alleged lack of good parenting. And, above all, I was surprised that nobody seemed to realise that keeping books in schools means taking away an important learning tool from children. I wonder how students can remember a lesson if they are not given a chance to look in their exercise book between lessons. And, once you have decided that they don’t need their exercise books for learning, what’s then the big deal if they forget them at home?

Here, we finally come to the heart of the problem. The function of exercise books in England has little to do with students’ learning but a lot with Ofsted inspections. Exercise books are used by Ofsted inspectors, in addition to lesson observations, to assess teachers’ teaching and students’ learning. It appears that it is a disaster if some books are missing when Ofsted inspectors come, because it could affect their report negatively. That’s why it’s safer for schools if books remain in school. That they are in that way useless to students doesn’t seem to bother the inspectors or the school staff. They all repeat this story that children in London cannot be trusted to take their books home, as if they were trying to convince themselves that there is a rationale behind this absurd habit dictated by Ofsted inspections.

Fortunately, I have seen some teachers send their students home with their books, but they are a minority. Needless to say that students in independent schools can be trusted and do take their exercise books home. No bad parenting there apparently. And, above all, no Ofsted inspections.