Every July, I take a look at book borrowing trends throughout the school year and examine how students engage with the library that I manage.
I won't break it all down section by section but what I will say is that the reason why we have such engaged students when it comes to using the library and borrowing books is because they are given ownership over the space and are allowed to choose what they read. Our library door, on average, opens over 800 times a day whether that's for students coming to borrow books, have their library lessons, attend one of our daily clubs, use the computers or they might need a safe place to hang out with their friends and draw their favourite anime characters on scrap paper.
In our library, books were borrowed well over 10,000 times from September to July. To me, what's important about that number are the kinds of books that are borrowed the most. The books pictured below are important to me for a few reasons. I'm speaking about novels, I will discuss comics and manga in a different post because they deserve their own post. I will say that manga and comics are the reason that boys borrowed 30% more than girls this year, a trend that is not common when looking at the national picture. Girls are also borrowing more, so it's not because of a drop in girls' borrowing habits or engagement.
Again, the main reason is choice, we give them loads of choice.
One reason I'm excited to see these books make the top of the list is because 6 of the 9 authors listed below visited the school either in person or virtually. I can't stress how much of an impact an author has when they visit students. Engagement in the library always spikes after an author visit, and I would bet my next paycheck that the authors' book will be the most popular book in the school that month. Students are also more likely to engage in creative writing after an author visit and read for fun on their own time (National Literacy Trust, 2023).
I will also point out that 7 of the 9 books listed were part of our internal book award, called The Bookling. I spend a huge amount of time promoting the Book Award books and getting students and teachers involved.
The other reason I'm very happy to see these books as our most popular is the wide range of voices. I am very grateful to work in a school where I get to interact with students from several different backgrounds, faiths, countries and experiences. I did not have this growing up, the school I attended was not very diverse and I really love meeting students with different experiences than I have had.
There is a huge problem here, though, in that there has been a drastic decline in representation in children's literature
(Inclusive Books for Children) which is appalling considering that 30% of nursery and primary children in the UK belong to ethnic minority groups.
It's frustrating and infuriating to me that we can't stock our shelves with books that represent the student population, but it's not surprising. I've been very fortunate that I've met a lot of authors in the past thirteen years that I've been a librarian. I'm now also an author, and I am getting little glimpses into the world of publishing.
We know that books that reflect a diverse range of voices are popular, my library is living proof of this. The stat that I've just discussed above took seconds to generate, these are the top books in the school, six of them come from diverse voices.
It's staggering to me that the publishing world doesn't realise this. I don't have the answers, I'm not some publishing insider with an eye on why this is the case. In my opinion, they are either too hesitant to take chances, relying on the false presmise that books written by ethnic minority authors won't sell, or they simply aren't diverse enough in their own workplaces and they don't consider books outside of their own experiences, or both.
I don't pretend to have the answer, what I know is that my job is to put books into the hands of students. These are books that should reflect their own experiences and put them into the shoes of other people so they can, for a short time, be a part of a different culture, religion, race, country, whatever it may be.
This is what reading is supposed to do. I also wonder if publishing is perhaps somewhat too timid in its approach - too scared to take on books that they think might get challenged in this new reality where the internet appears to have been infected with hoards of undateable male hate-nerds who rally against anything that fosters empathy and understanding.
I truly do not know why publishing doesn't take on more diverse voices when they are so popular with readers.
Another reason, in my view is that most schools don't have a library and a librarian with a budget to bring authors in and to fill the shelves with books from different voices.
I'm very fortunate to be able to visit schools around the UK both as a librarian and an author and I see the same cycle over and over again, they are typically not valued by the senior leadership team, they have almost no budget, and they often see their library space reduced or removed outright.
In May I visited a school as an author, I was very excited to be there and the students were amazing. When I arrived, though, I was greeted by the librarian who immediately apologised for her library space before I'd even seen it. When we got there, there was one shelf of books and a giant boardroom table stuck in the middle of the room.
"The previous Headteacher removed all of the shelves," she said, "I had to sneak this one back in. The room is now a boardroom but it's never used as one, it's essentially a dead space, now."
I wasn't surprised, and there is nothing I can do in that moment but say "sorry" because I am not going to change the minds of that schools's senior leadership team. In my opinion, the only thing that can change the mind of a shortsighted senior leadership team is the Department of Education. Unfortunately, seeing six Prime Ministers in ten years here in the UK, each of whom have done nothing in my opinion to help school libraries, I do not hold out hope.
And I do not mean to be cynical, but I've seen this so many times that it's hard not to view any deicsions made by the Dept of Ed with a grain of salt.
They don't have a librarian to give them choice, and this is what matters. Giving them agency over the library space while at the same time helping them find the right book - but ultimately unveiling to them that they own the space together with the other students, and the space is theirs, these books and these experiences are theirs.
Choice matters, representation matters, librarians matter. What we need in my opinion is a dedicated government strategy to ensure there are libraries and librarians in every school and for those librarians to be given a good budget to do what they do best. I also feel we need publishing to take chances on new and diverse voices and for their own office spaces to reflect the vast array of experiences and voices that are clamouring to be heard.
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