Packaging the primary curriculum: textbooks and the English National Curriculum

SUMMARY Commercial publishers have been quick to respond to the opportunities afforded by the National Curriculum. This paper examines some of the new (or in some cases ‘updated') primary coursebook schemes, and asks what might be the implications for the primary curriculum, should such schemes be widely adopted in schools. It might be thought that these commercial textbooks simply complete the job begun by the National Curriculum – i.e. ‘technologizing’ learning by breaking it down into segments and stages. But we suggest that their function, and hence their construction as texts, is rather more complex. The new schemes embrace a number of different educational ideologies, and appeal to a number of different teacher identities. They speak, for instance, to the ‘teacher‐as‐professionaP and to the ‘teacher‐in‐trouble’. They profess both ‘progressive’ and ‘traditional’ values. Rather than indicating unequivocally a tendency to deskill teachers and disempower pupils, as some educationalists would believe, the new textbooks are rather more plural and multi‐vocal therefore. Their ultimate impact and import will, of course, become clear only when we discover how the new books are used in teachers’ day‐to‐day practice.