This week saw a librarian described as the “beating heart” of her school.
Julie Sutherland had just won the Scottish Book Trust’s Learning Professional Award for her work as a librarian at Edinburgh’s Forrester High School.
And she took the opportunity to say this: ”School libraries and librarians have been under threat from budget and job cuts across the UK for a long time. I hope that this award will illuminate the positive effect we can have on a young person’s life.
“It’s not just about developing literacy and a love for reading, it’s about the whole person and being there for every young person that needs your support.”
One wonders, though, if libraries are seen as a bit of a middle-class indulgence; a pleasant frippery that can be dispensed with if necessary. Certainly, nestling deep in an Audit Scotland report this week was evidence that libraries are seen as fair game when times are hard.
A stark series of bar graphs showed the difference between total public library opening hours before Covid and as at February 2022, in each of Scotland’s 32 local authorities.
Unsurprisingly, opening hours were not longer this February compared with pre-Covid in any of the 32, but at least they were unchanged in five - kudos to Clackmannanshire, Falkirk, Moray, South Ayrshire and Stirling.
In the other 27, however, total library hours fell by anything from 2 per cent to a breathtaking 58 per cent in Dumfries and Galloway (see p36 here).
This should perhaps come as no surprise. Public and school libraries often have to fight for their right to exist, or at least to maintain some sort of meaningful presence in their community or school. In 2018, for example, there was widespread condemnation when one council proposed replacing professional school librarians with pupils.
A UK-wide report in 2019 - commissioned by the Great School Libraries campaign and run by CILIP (the library and information association) and the School Library Association - showed that schools with more disadvantaged pupils were much less likely to have access to a library. That disparity was described by children’s laureate Cressida Cowell as a “social mobility time bomb”.
“Nobody has yet answered this question for me: if a child’s parents cannot afford books, if there isn’t a library in their school, and they don’t have opportunities to visit a public library, how on earth can they become a reader for pleasure?” Cowell asked, pointing to research showing how important reading for pleasure was to children’s life prospects.
Lindsay Craik-Collins, curricular leader of English and media at Forrester High, summed up why her colleague, Julie Sutherland, had deserved the award: “Julie puts her heart and soul into everything that she does, with the pupils at the centre of all of her work.
“She is the beating heart of our school, reaching out to support all departments and areas within. Her relationships, creativity and determination open millions of doors and experiences for our students, and our school community would be lost without her.”
Feedback from students described the Forrester High library as a “safe space” where Ms Sutherland treated pupils as individuals, taking the time to get to know their personal situations, their personalities and what might be stopping them from learning. She helped them “feel part of the bigger school picture...that their opinions and ideas are important and heard”.
This is the library as far more than a dispenser of books; it is the library as a socially cohesive force and a springboard for learning.
And who would want to get rid of that?
Henry Hepburn is Scotland editor at Tes. He tweets @Henry_Hepburn
