to find out the truth.But before you bare your soul, do you recognise this do you recognise this stalwart of the staffroom?
Mrs Stamp - School Librarian
Mrs Stamp has been school librarian longer than anyone can remember. And her routine is set in stone. There is a point during each afternoon - which she knows from experience to be the quietest - when she will take her sandwiches and a good PG Wodehouse novel to the staffroom for a peaceful 20 minutes.
The role, though, has changed over her career. She is now manager of the “Resources Centre”. Book theft has risen sharply - without any obvious sign that the children are actually reading their illegal acquisitions - and borrowing has fallen inversely. She now has to staunchly defend her faded corner of the educational empire from the “sin-bins”, “catch-up” classes and “one-to-one” sessions in various guises that threaten to drop anchor extremely noisily.
Mrs Stamp blames technology. Children who were once content to have their noses stuck in a good book are now into this “online gaming” and “social networking”. Twitter? Twaddle, more like.
And then there’s this Kindle nonsense. Her Reggie made the cardinal mistake of buying her one last Christmas. Come New Year, she begrudgingly let him back into the house on the condition that he returned it to the shop after the sales.
Not that she’s totally averse to technology. Computers can, she admits, be “a remarkable tool” (she was pleased with that phrase when she did her presentation to the governors). And she has, after all, used the small unfriendly boxes of wires to produce all sorts of multicoloured graphs about the number and types of books borrowed.
Yet technology is ultimately going to be her undoing. She expects each August to be walking the plank, with the cocky young assistant headteacher eyeing up her space to launch his “Independent Learning Zone”. But she will fight them every step of the way. This school library is not for sinking just yet.
