Research context

Following the longstanding concerns about mathematics attainment, the Department for Education (DfE) in England, from 2016, invested substantial funding to provide primary schools in England with matched-funding to support the purchase of DfE-approved textbook-schemes. The DfE aspiration was that 8000 primary schools would be given access to “the south Asian ‘mastery’ approach to teaching maths … supported by the use of high-quality textbooks” (DfE, 2016, n.p., see also Pratt & Alderton, 2023). This national initiative sought to challenge the controversial view of textbook-scheme use, seeking to support primary schools in teaching primary mathematics. It promoted the use of textbook-schemes based on the idea that high-quality textbooks underpin teaching in the highest performing jurisdictions (NCETM, 2022a).

What counts as a textbook?  

Of course not all primary schools use textbooks to support mathematics teaching, and with many resources online rather than in print the very term ‘textbook’ only partially addresses the way that schools use materials to support mathematics curriculum delivery.  Our research focuses on the use of textbooks and curriculum resources and includes both online or printed, digital and physical resources that are used to structure curriculum delivery. This means that we include full textbook schemes such as Power maths, White Rose and Maths No Problem! as well as materials drawn or downloaded from sources that may be used to support activities in individual lessons, eg materials from Mathletics, Hamilton Trust or Nrich. 

As part of our project, we sought to establish the range of curriculum resources currently in use by primary schools in England.

Research questions 

Our research addresses the following three research questions: 

RQ1. What are the current trends in the national and regional uptake of curriculum resources in primary mathematics? 

RQ2. How are curriculum resources being used by schools?  

RQ3. How does eligibility for DfE-approved textbook funding affect (RQ1) and (RQ2)? 

Research methods 

Our project employed two online surveys and 12 mathematics subject leader interviews.

Survey One (late autumn 2021 – January 2022): a population-wide survey of school-level practices. This provided us with a robust account of current practices, producing a powerful data-set capturing trends and influencing factors in the uptake and use of textbooks and curriculum resources. This survey covered all state-maintained schools in England covering some or all of the primary years 1-6, amounting to over 17,000 schools. We purposely did not included Reception as practice here is so different and it would be inappropriate to combine Reception with the National Curriculum years.

Survey Two (spring 2022): a survey of teachers’ practices.  Data from this survey enhanced our data-set, providing an account of how whole-school policy is enacted by primary teachers in the primary mathematics classroom. 

Mathematics subject leader interviews (autumn 2022): These one to one interviews enabled findings from the survey to be explored in greater depth. In these interviews we probed the reasons for the curriculum resource decisions that schools have made. These enabled us to add vignettes to contextualise survey findings in the main report.