The SLA Awards provide a chance to shine a spotlight on the incredibly important work which is happening in school libraries including providing solutions to issues around wellbeing and diversity, media and information literacy, inquiry learning and reading.

The 2023 Secondary School Librarian of the Year was awarded to Bridget Hamlet from Rushey Mead Academy, Leicester. Bridget has not only had a huge impact on the library at Rushey Mead, transforming it into a welcoming, vibrant space, but she has also set up libraries in other schools in the Academy Trust. She ensures that these libraries are established according to each school’s needs and that the librarian who will run it is fully trained and supported.  

Bridget was very keen to highlight the brilliance of her local schools' library service – Creative Learning Services (CLS) – who booktalked to Year 9 students last year. Bridget had the pleasure of selecting books from their showroom.

Now Bridget gives us her take on a question most school librarians can only dream of being asked,

What if you had £1,000 to spend on your school library?

Imagine it: your headteacher approaches you and says, “We’ve got a thousand pounds surplus and I’d like to spend it on the library.”  I know that this might be a dream scenario for many school library staff or teachers running their school libraries, but sometimes it happens.  And if it happens, it is usually towards the end of the financial year…and you’ve got to spend the money quickly or it will be cruelly snatched back from you and spent on something like playground markings.  The clock is ticking now, and you feel the weight of responsibility bearing down on you.  What could you do with £1000 and really make an impact?

Firstly, don’t you dare think of spending it on anything other than books.  You can have the most amazing library space in the land with fairy lights and bean bags galore, but if it’s full of empty shelves or tatty old books, then you can forget any lasting impact.  It’s all about the books!  But where do you even begin with so many to choose from and such a relatively small amount of money?  It is tempting to go to a bargain high street shop and fill a trolley with picture book bundles and cheap paperback box sets.  I get it, I really do.  And there is nothing inherently wrong with that.  

But what happens to those books when you bring them back to school?  Someone has probably bought many of those same titles before, and lots of those books are still in pristine condition in your library because they haven’t been borrowed.  All I’m saying is give it some thought before it becomes a false economy.  If you can see which series, authors and titles have been read to pieces and deserve to be replaced, then by all means get those books for a bargain basement price.  But practice a bit of restraint by dedicating no more than a third of the pot to the “sure things” – those books you know for certain will always be your bestsellers.

The real point here is to give yourself some time to make considered purchases and to have a plan of action once those books hit your shelves.  If you spend all of the money on the same popular titles you’ve always had, well at least you know they’ll get borrowed and it wasn’t wasted.  But what if you could put in a little more time and effort in the planning of your purchases to make some waves into your reading culture across the school?  

So let’s take another third of the pot and dedicate that to your most reluctant readers.  Now every school is different, but I reckon that most schools would be identifying boys in that group…and that those boys might be coming from disadvantaged or vulnerable backgrounds.  That would certainly be the case in my school.  And the one type of book that universally gets those students to read – and truly ENJOY what they’re reading – is graphic novels.  To be specific, I am talking about series like Dog Man by Dav Pilkey, Bunny vs Monkey by Jamie Smart and anything within the manga/anime genre (you can generally be on the safe side with Pokemon if you’re unsure about content).  You can’t go wrong with anything by Raina Telgemeier either.  If you can target those reluctant readers and create a comic book club or keep the books exclusively for certain students to have “first dibs” before everyone else gets them, then even better.  Explode the moment!  Make them feel special and take their enthusiasm to power-up reading across the school – highlight those avid readers in the school newsletter, send postcards home to their parents, allow them to make wishlists of the next books to get in the library.  In short, make them identify as readers by rewarding them and praising them for being readers.

Now let’s use that last third of the pot for a special initiative – like a school-wide book award or to sign up to a book challenge that might already be happening in your region.  In Leicester we have Our Best Book for primary schools and Reading Rampage for secondaries.  Warwickshire SLS runs an annual young adult book award – and many other regions have something similar.  So before you reinvent the wheel, do a bit of research to see if there is a ready-made project you can simply sign up to.  What a project like this usually involves is getting multiple copies of a set selection of books – say 5 copies of 10 different titles.  You then spend a term or so promoting, reading and judging the books.  This is something that can be scaled for your particular setting and adjusted for targeted groups and time frames too.  The benefit of this is a shared reading experience for groups of students and a big boost in promoting reading as a fun leisure activity – which can become an annual reading event on the school calendar, potentially reusing the same books for new cohorts as students move up the school.  The whole initiative ends with a celebration – crowning the winning title and rewarding some of the top readers who took part (and making sure you put loads of pictures in the school newsletter!)  Limiting the invitations to the big celebration ceremony to the most enthusiastic readers, not always just the ones who read the most, is certainly an incentive in my school whenever we run projects like this.

So ultimately what I want to impress upon you is that if you are given the opportunity to spend £1,000 on your library, definitely spend it all on books.  But also, be smart about it and use it for maximum impact across the school by linking those books to reading initiatives that target specific groups of students.  And here’s the kicker – you have to shout from the rooftops about all of the amazing things you were able to do with that money!  You must remember to do that; that’s the part most school library staff forget to do.  If your headteacher, teachers, parents and governors know what an amazing impact can be had with such a relatively small investment, then they are far more likely to give you £1,000 again and again and again. 

If your school doesn't have a spare £1,000 at the moment and needs a helping hand, LoveReading can help!

Every time a customer buys a book from us, 25% of the cover price can be donated to a school to help them buy more books. So encourage parents, carers, family and friends to buy books through LoveReading or LoveReading4Kids and allocate funds to your school.

Wishlists
Set up wishlists of books you would like to be gifted to your school and share the link with your community. When books are purchased from your wishlists, you'll not only get the book but the customer can also allocate 25% of their spend to your school to spend on more books. View our FAQs for Schools for more information.

The LoveReading4Kids Funding for Schools Scheme accepts applications from state funded schools in need in the UK for between £1,000 and £5,000. Read more information here about what we fund and who is eligible to apply.

Thanks to Bridget for talking to us here at LoveReading4Schools, and congratulations again on your win!

https://www.sla.org.uk