Class Action: why texbooks are not an essential tool for teaching children

It is hard for schools adopting an international curriculum to follow a textbook, simply because few good textbooks are available. The international curriculum also offers some flexibility as to when units are taught, which is not always in the same order as a textbook.

You can support your daughter with a general focus on maths and literacy using supplementary textbooks from overseas. These are easy enough to order online. However, this is not specifically what your daughter is learning at school that week, which I suspect is what you mean.

If you have decided to send your daughter to an international school, you are also paying for a more individualised approach to learning. Teachers in such schools are asked to differentiate lessons in their classrooms so each child is taught at a level relevant to them.

So, in writing, if a child still needs work on letter formation, they are not ready for speech marks. It also means a child confident with speech marks can be given a different activity, too. In upper primary, some schools split up their maths classes, so that those needing extra help in an area can be in a smaller group and those needing extensions can work together. A textbook only teaches at one level, which does not support such differentiated learning.

This is very different from the local methods of teaching, in which all children follow the same textbook and have to pass the same test. That test is then a cut-off point, which may impact adversely on a child's future if they are sick on that day.

International schools apply an evaluation method that allows children to move along a continuum of learning.

That testing is not to show what they were able to learn the night before the test, but to demonstrate what they are capable of on any given day. Teachers are looking at the rate of learning, as well as the level achieved.