It is high time that high quality textbooks returned to classrooms, education minister Nick Gibb has said in a foreword to a new report. The MP said that a "renaissance of intellectually demanding and knowledge-rich textbooks" in England's schools is a necessary tool for boosting standards and delivering excellence in pupils.

Writing in the paper Why Textbooks Count, which was penned by Tom Oates, director of assessment research and development at exam board Cambridge Assessment, Mr Gibb stated that textbooks are excellent compendiums of relevant information that deliver the necessary "knowledge implicit in the national curriculum programmes of study".

The fact that textbooks have lost favour with teachers in England contributes to the country's comparably poor academic performance in international league tables, the education minister explained.

For example, in England, only ten per cent of teachers use maths textbooks "as the basis for their teaching", Mr Gibb elaborated, compared to Singapore and Finland, where the respective figures are 70 per cent and 95 per cent. Both these countries consistently deliver high standards of education and regularly top performance charts.

"Ideological hostility to the use of textbooks, particularly in primary schools, developed in the 1970s," he claimed in his foreword. "Their replacement with work sheets and hundreds of thousands of bespoke written lesson plans has added to teacher workload, detracted from coherence and impacted on standards."

In his study, Mr Oates argues that "without realising it, England has fallen behind the times" academically. He compares it to geology. For example, within this discipline a phrase is thrown around – "geological time is now". This basically refers to the fact that while you may not notice the Himalayan mountains moving, they are.

Likewise, within education, there has been an "unconscious" movement away from textbooks. Teachers, pupils and parents may not have been aware of this, but, according to Mr Oates, it has been happening for a very long time. In their place are worksheets and lesson plans, which while useful, lack the substance of textbooks.

"We’ve missed the fact that we have picked up some bad habits, and failed to notice the emergence, in other nations, of extremely well-theorised, well-designed, and carefully-implemented textbooks," the expert stated in the report.

"We’ve also missed the fact that high quality textbooks support both teachers and pupils – they free teachers up to concentrate on refining pedagogy and developing engaging, effective learning."

He takes into consideration the fact that we are in the information age, one dominated by technology and the digitisation of books, newspapers and other written materials. Mr Oates accepts that digital has a place, but nevertheless believes that this technology must exist alongside paper versions.

Each has its merits. Studies show, for example, that people still respond better to paper text than they do digital, the latter being synonymous, some would say, with a rapid "information throwaway culture". Our ability to retain details via digital is less explicit, because we're so used to consuming lots of information on a daily basis.

Our approach to books however, is predicated on a comparably leisured approach – again, research shows that we comprehend more via paper because customarily this has always been the case.