Earl of Clancarty
Main Page: Earl of Clancarty (Crossbench - Excepted Hereditary)
The Earl of Clancarty (CB)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, for the opportunity to talk about the importance of books within our culture.
Proper contact with books starts in the home or in schools, and if not in the home then it should certainly begin in schools. My daughter, who is now nine, has been lucky in the two primary schools she has been to—one private, one state—in that they both have decent libraries and librarians, one full time, the other coming in twice a week. But more than this, in both cases the library is located at the geographical centre of each school, not off to one side where it can be lopped off or forgotten about. It is a place through which children have to pass at least twice a day, and for primary school children, in particular, there is then this immediate contact with books. The Libraries All-Party Group chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Tope, in the title of its recent report put together by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, calls the library:
“The Beating Heart of the School”,
which is exactly what the library should be.
I am not someone who believes that it should be a choice between the internet, e-books or hard-copy books. They all do different things and should complement each other. The internet is great for focused research on a specific topic, up to a point, but a school library enables a pupil to expand their horizons in important, less predictable ways. For example, a good teacher or librarian will say to a pupil, “You’ve read this—now try this”. The adventurous and browsing elements which good school libraries enable are greatly underrated in the development of a child’s interests. Books can and should be at the very heart of this process.
My child is lucky at her state school but, unhappily, this is not the case everywhere. I find it extraordinary that school libraries are not compulsory at a time when we as a society are so concerned about literacy; the link between school libraries and literacy is one of the things which the Libraries All-Party Group report recommends that the Department for Education thoroughly examine. It is clear that there is a crisis, with threats to the continuing existence of libraries and librarians. For example, the DfE school workforce data for England show a reduction of 280 librarians within a two-year period. The report also cites the 2010 UK national survey of school libraries, showing a 7% fall over three years in the number of primary school libraries with library space. The same survey showed that while relatively few primary schools had a designated school librarian, 90% of them accessed support via the schools library services. However, because that is often a traded service to schools, some schools are choosing to no longer use those services when money is tight.
A major problem is the lack of comprehensive data about the number of school libraries and librarians. One of the other recommendations that the report makes is that the DfE should ensure that that information becomes part of the annual data submission for schools. Nevertheless, the current evidence, however patchy and anecdotal, suggests that this situation is continuing to worsen.
A good school library should be represented in all areas: fiction, non-fiction, arts and sciences. Art books have traditionally had a special place in school libraries, in part because of their visual immediacy, and art teachers continue to use books as a vital resource in classes. This raises another issue: libraries need to be kept up to date. In the case of art, this means purchasing catalogues of new exhibitions. As the National Society for Education in Art and Design told me this week, “It is almost a given that teachers will supply their own up-to-date art books in schools”. Indeed, one teacher told me that she has spent more than £500 a year on visual resources, such as books, DVDs, posters and art magazines. It is admirable that art teachers are so passionate about their subject and their pupils’ engagement to make these outlays—if, of course, they can afford to do so— but it is a sad reflection on the amount and system of school funding that libraries or departments cannot purchase these books that can then be made available to pupils in the long term.
Every pupil at primary and secondary school level deserves access to a good school library. I hope that the Government will take steps to reverse the current trend and ensure that this becomes a reality.