ABSTRACT
Textbooks are still the most widely used resource for teaching and learning in British schools (see Westaway and Rawling, 1998, p. 36). Even in the post-Plowden (1967) heyday of progressivism in primary education, hostile in principle to textbooks, government inspectors found three-fifths of upper junior classes used them in their geography and history lessons (DES, 1978, pp. 73-4). Yet the most conspicuous feature of attitudes in British educational circles towards school textbooks has remained a high level of negativism and/or neglect. Stray remarked that 'textbooks have rarely been taken seriously as an object of study' (1994, p. 1), while Wilkes described them as ' ... the most despised literary genre of all' (1997, p. 44). Graves observed that research output was 'pitifully small' (1997a, p. 62).
