Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps he is taking to ensure that every school pupil has access to high quality textbooks and learning resources.

The Department announced the £7.7 million Curriculum Fund in January 2018 to help reduce unnecessary workload in curriculum planning and improve pupil outcomes. The Department intends to improve access to high quality complete curriculum programmes, including textbooks and digital resources. As a first step to achieving this, the Department launched a pilot grant on 26 July 2018 to fund lead schools that have already developed high quality programmes in science, history and geography. 11 lead schools with high quality programmes are being awarded grants, and each school will work with at least 6 other participating schools to identify best practice over the course of 2019. The list of successful schools can be found at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/curriculum-fund-programme-pilots-list-of-lead-schools.

The Department’s ongoing Teaching for Mastery programme, which aims to embed a ‘mastery’ approach to mathematics, includes provision of up to £2,000 match funding for eligible schools to spend on high quality textbooks recommended through an expert panel process. In addition, the new National Centre for Computing Education will provide a complete curriculum programmes aligned to the content of the national computing curriculum from ages 5 to 16.

The new National Centre for Computing Education will provide a repository of free, knowledge-rich resources, aligned to the content of the national computing curriculum at key stages 1-4, to support the teaching of computing in primary and secondary schools.

The Department plans to identify high quality complete curriculum programmes across a wider range of subjects to support teachers to provide a broad and balanced curriculum across primary and secondary schools, subject to the outcome of the Curriculum Fund pilots.