The headline figure from the Frontier Economics report is striking: Published textbooks pay for themselves if they save teachers four-and-a-half minutes per day.
The study comes at a time when the UK’s school system is targeting budget reductions of 8% by 2019/20 and with textbooks often identified as one area where costs can be saved (by replacing them with free online resources).
Considering the calculation to be conservative, Frontier Economics found evidence suggesting that textbooks may save teachers as much as 18 minutes per day, meaning textbooks pay for themselves four times over.
The survey based its calculation on the amount of time teachers spend preparing their lessons and the total spend on printed resources in schools, setting that against the results of a survey conducted by HarperCollins in 2016. Textbooks save teachers time by helping them to structure classes, providing ready-made resources and facilitating marking.
You can read the Publishers Association Press release here and the report here.