INSIGHT ‘‘ SLG
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It is a truth fairly universally acknowledged by school librarians that our true value and worth is often misunderstood by those outside the profession...
Mary Rose Grieve, School Librarian, Hartland International School.
T MIGHT be tempting for school librarians to roll their eyes and proclaim that every year in their libraries is a year of reading – and of course they would be right – but what if the National Year of Reading allowed us to supercharge our work with children while at the same time being the best advocacy tool for our profession?
The five Golden Threads of creating a reading culture: leadership, choice and agency, environment and access, social reading, and an inclusive reading culture (as found in the NLT Secondary Self Reflection document) are all the key principles that underpin the work of the school librarian and so we are presented with the most golden of opportunities to highlight and advocate for our work.
It is a truth fairly universally acknowledged by school librarians that our true value and worth is often misunderstood by those outside the profession; if I had a pound for every time someone said ‘how lovely to be able to read books all day’ when I tell them I am a librarian, I would be sitting in the Bahamas. So, rather than dreaming up new initiatives, events and promotions, let’s use the National Year of Reading as a vehicle to market the work we are already doing in our libraries every day to open routes into reading – both for pleasure and progress – but also to allow us to enhance, develop and embed those best practices. The excellent NLT Learning Platform is a treasure trove of resources, webinars and audits which can act as both prompt and publicity. I have really enjoyed working through the Secondary and Primary pathways on the platform discovering new ways to frame and develop the work we do in both our libraries but more importantly to help me find more ways to connect us to colleagues and departments in the school in a more strategic way by using the NYOR as the driver for collaboration – and to challenge the idea that school librarians are only involved in reading for pleasure and wellbeing.
In fact, we need to reframe this and reposition reading for pleasure into a much broader reading practice which is supported and enabled in the school library. In his chapter in The Future of Knowledge, Ted Selker writes: “We go
February-March 2026
to libraries with our hunger for learning information and understanding. Our learning can be our effort to get knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Our learning can be get good at crossword puzzles. Our learning can be to answer other questions for ourselves and others too. Our learning might be a respite, reading about others or fantasy worlds to take us away from the reality of our lives and troubles. Our learning might also be to try and learn to create understandings that we can use to solve new problems, in possibly creative ways”. (Chappell, Billingsley and Simpson, pp. 88) In other words, reading for pleasure is another way to fulfil a desire to learn. “When children see that reading connects to who they are and what they care about, motivation follows naturally.” So a breadth and depth of reading materials – not just printed books – allow us to meet our students where they are, to allow them to explore their interest in a curriculum subject, a hobby or sport, or to feed their curiosity about themselves and the world around them. So, this year, is all about meeting our readers where they are and supporting and encouraging their interests and passions – to go beyond reading for reading’s sake and instead speak to their motivations, identifying the barriers to reading and celebrating reading in all its forms. IP
References NLT Learning Platform
https://learningplatform.literacytrust.org.uk/login/index.php
Secondary Self-Reflection Guide:
https://nlt.hacdn.org/media/documents/03._Secondary_Self- reflection_guide_FINAL.pdf
Chappell, Keith, Berry Billingsley, and Sherralyn Simpson. The Future of Knowledge: The Role of Epistemic Insight in Interdisciplinary Learning. Bloomsbury, 2024.
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