You don’t have to be here long to know we are BIG fans of school libraries! And really – we aren’t alone in that.

Every research study shows how valuable a well-run school library can be for a good education. Far more than just a place to check out books, a good school library provides materials, instruction, and programs to ensure kids leave school with the skills they need to move forward.

So I was delighted to see this very nice article about good school libraries! We are sharing an excerpt below, to give you some ideas about how valuable school libraries are. You can read the whole thing right here.

“As an educator, I will always remember a particular moment during the unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic. It occurred in the midst of the daily shutting down of the pillars of society when teachers were pivoting rapidly from face-to-face to remote teaching. We were desperate for information, and we began drowning in options…

Someone needed to bring order! Someone needed to collect all these ideas and put the best ones in a central place so that they could be easily searched and found.

That’s when I realised that person was me.

You see, I am a teacher librarian. This means that I’m a qualified teacher AND a qualified librarian. I know about information management (how to categorise things), about teaching and learning (what will work best for the curriculum, for our particular students and our particular teachers), about reading (for fun and for information), about differentiation (how to support those who struggle and to extend those who need it) and about quality assessment (how to find out what students know in a way that they can’t Google the answer). I know how to create useful services — how to figure out what people might need and to give it to them in a way that they find useful without making them feel bad for seeking help. People come to a teacher librarian when they are stuck. We are a human version of the “Room of Requirement”. [For non-Harry Potter fans, this is a room that magically appears to satisfy the specific need of a person walking down a certain corridor].

Teacher librarians know how to look at the needs of the whole school as a community as well as the needs of the individuals within it. The best way to use a teacher librarian is for them to team-teach with classroom teachers. Unfortunately, many principals, caught in the vice of ongoing funding cuts, have cut the role altogether. However, just focussing on the financial cost of the staff member belies the fact that with a highly skilled teacher librarian, you actually get a school leader for the ‘price’ of a classroom teacher. It’s not an exaggeration to say that high-quality school library services positively impact every lesson in every classroom every day….

It’s been fantastic, actually. Without the physical library space, teacher librarians were able to let all our other services shine just at the time when our communities needed them.

But here’s the bitter pill that most parents don’t realise: most schools don’t have us. Most students and teachers just had to wing it through that chaotic time as they’ve had to wing it before COVID-19 without our services. Too many people think that teacher librarians are just shushing book stackers. Please!

Here’s the bitter pill: most schools don’t have us.

Every year, when I read about falling literacy outcomes, falling trust due to fake news and falling mental health of teachers and students, I feel so frustrated because I know what can help reverse those trends. Now, with the Grattan Institute’s COVID Catch-up report recommending urgent intervention to help disadvantaged students catch up after the lockdown, I’m thinking about the long-term answer to the achievement gap which already existed at “about 10 times larger” than what grew during the COVID-19 lockdown.

Sure, there’s no magic pill to completely fix all those things in a blink, but there is a living, breathing, walking, talking ‘Room of Requirement’ that can (and should!) be available in every school. As we’ve seen during COVID-19, it’s the school library people, not the place, that matter most. All students need school libraries run by a teacher librarian and qualified library staff.”

You can read the entire article here!