contemporary children’s fiction and non-fiction. In many schools there are small scale
programmes of promotional activities similar to those in public libraries. There is
genuine concern that the absence of official standards of provision, exacerbated by
national financial cutbacks in education and ideological divisions, pose a serious threat
to those endeavours.
School library servicesThe origins of school library services lie in the early public library movement when
schools were permitted to borrow material from public libraries. Historically, after the
Public Libraries Act of 1919, the English and Welsh county authorities were the first to
develop this central support service to primary and secondary schools. For many
primary schools this constituted a vital complementary source of books, and for some,
the only source. School library services were later established in the London boroughs,
and following local government re-organisation in the early 1970s many of the new
metropolitan library authorities introduced such services. Traditionally, they were
operated by the library department of the local authority as an agent of the education
department, with costs normally being met from the education budget. As with school
libraries, there is no statutory obligation in England and Wales to offer a central support
service. In Northern Ireland, however, where the five education and library boards are
responsible for both education and library services, the school library service is a
statutory function. In Scotland too, the school library services are for the most part
provided as a statutory function of the regional education service.
At their zenith in the 1970s and early 1980s, schools library services provided crucial
support with an array of services including the loan of materials to supplement school
library collections, collections designed to support project work, centralised purchasing
and processing services which enabled teachers and teacher-librarians to select
material using their own library budget, to aid selection and promotion, exhibitions,
information skills programmes for pupils and teachers and an advisory service for school
librarians and teachers.
School library services in England and Wales have been subject to fundamental
changes in recent years resulting from the passing of the 1988 Education Reform Act
and the introduction of Local Management of Schools. Funding is now devolved to schools
giving headteachers the choice of buying back centralised services or spending the
money unilaterally. Consequently many school library services have been forced to cut
or reorganise their services to make themselves financially viable. In a growing number
of authorities, alternative structures have been introduced, such as management of the
schools library service by the local education authority, or the creation of an independent
business unit. In a few authorities insufficient schools chose to ‘buy back’ into the
central schools library service which became economically unviable, and subsequently
closed.
The future for school library services remains uncertain, but what cannot be denied is
that they have played a critical role in supporting the formal and nonformal education
needs of many children. The contraction of these services together with the constraints
LIBRARIANSHIP 623