School workbooks are they really needed at all?

THE school holidays are coming to an end and school will soon return.

Parents are getting children ready for the return with new uniforms and schoolbooks.

While new editions of schoolbooks are the bane of parents life, putting additional expense on them in having to buy a new edition, rather than the previous edition secondhand, the bigger issue for many parents is the increasing reliance on workbooks.

These workbooks must be bought new, as they are to filled in during the course of the year and there are workbooks for maths, English, Irish and every other subject.

What is worse is the workbooks don’t come home in the schoolbag but remain in the classroom, so parents cannot check progress throughout the year.

An increasing practice too is for teachers to photocopy pages from the workbook and send these single pages home.

What is the point of that? Parents buy the book and then pay for photocopying.

What really bugs parents however is to finally get to see the workbook at the end of the school year and see less than an quarter of the workbook complete and similarly in several other workbooks.

It begs the question, what is the need for the workbooks in the first place if they are not going to be fully used, did the teacher get through the course work and could teachers not assess their book lists more carefully and consider parents pockets.