A library in every primary school – and no strategy to match?
Why the Chancellor’s library pledge might be missing the mark
I am writing this from the empty library of the school where I’m currently teaching for two days a week. I’m on my lunch break and steeling myself for Year One PE. The library is a calm space, clean and vibrant with clearly labelled book choices, and boxes of new purchases ready to be stocked. Looking at the timetable on the wall, each class gets twenty minutes per week here. Even if this always happens every week (and that’s doubtful, as stuff happens) that would add up to around four hours per week of use, or about 15% occupancy, probably supplemented by some small group interventions and the odd teacher wanting to eat lunch in a quiet place (or maybe even have a quick kip amongst the floor cushions – not me, of course). Although there isn’t data available, my guess is that this is a common pattern for the six in seven primary schools that do have a library. Good spaces are suffering from chronic underuse.
For the other one in seven primary schools, this week’s Labour Party conference signalled a small payday. The chancellor, who rarely gets out of bed to talk about any number less than nine figures, used her speech to announce spending of around £10M for ‘providing a library in every single primary school in England by the end of this parliament. That is a statement of my values.’ Cue cheers from the conference hall, praise from every response I read, and joy from those in the Libraries for Primaries campaign.
What’s not to like?
Here’s a law of policymaking – I won’t call it Hallgarten’s law yet as the chances are that someone else has already claimed it.
If a policy is universally liked, and causes no debate or controversy at all, it is probably not a policy with significant substance or meaning.
As Barak Obama once said, all the easy political decisions have already been made.
All children deserve access to the richest possible range of books, with regular opportunities to bring those books home. The decline in reading for pleasure amongst children is one of the biggest educational disasters in the last few decades. Whilst a number of societal factors are at play – screens being the probable biggie – schools and our system can play a role in addressing this.
However, If you had £10M to create a culture of reading, would additional school libraries be your first option? I’m far from convinced.
1. Where’s the evidence?
A recent evidence review of the impact of school libraries on outcomes, despite coming from a far from neutral starting point, fails to marshal compelling evidence. The impact evaluations from recent programmes to create new libraries in primary schools suffer from excessively positive self-reporting from school staff and children.
I’d describe these as “Christine Keeler” evaluations; “they would say that wouldn’t they?”[i].
Perhaps I am asking for the impossible, evidence-wise, but nobody knows whether schools with libraries do any better, reading-wise, than schools without. Of course, this is not the only thing government is doing to boost reading outcomes. 2026 is National Year of Reading, for example. But £10M is still a significant evidence-light cash allocation.
2. Is this creeping centralisation?
My second concern is that payments to schools like this mark another mission-creeping centralisation of educational power towards Whitehall[ii]. Those primary schools that do not have a library have made a conscious choice. They have decided that their money and space is better used elsewhere.
Through a one-off spend that is unlikely to be sustained, the Government has, without legislation or regulation, effectively made primary school libraries compulsory. The evidence of their efficacy is just not strong enough for Whitehall to make this call.
3. Might art rooms be a better option?
Third, I believe that there is already a far better call for any spare room going in a primary school. A space to teach art, design, and other practical, messy lessons that the average primary classroom struggles to cater for.
Ask almost any primary teacher, and they will talk about the pain of turning their classroom into an art room for one afternoon a week, It’s a weekly catastrophe of arts pedagogy, logistics and ambition.
As one teacher told me recently, doing this once a week for half a term for a toy car D+T module ‘made me question my life choices’. The Fabian Society documented the crisis in primary arts education in 2019, and it is likely that things have worsened since the pandemic. Again, a classroom for arts and design teaching won’t address all of the issues in arts education, but could provide a great foundation for other improvements[iii].
4. Is this spending without strategy?
I am not convinced that this spending decision has gone through any clear options analysis. £132M has been allocated from the dormant assets fund for enrichment for young people.
If I had this £132M, would I spend 8% on primary school libraries? I’m not sure.
5. Could our libraries work smarter?
If I wanted to maximise the impact of primary school libraries, I might start with the ones that are already there.
If I were in Government, I would be incentivising primary headteachers to make their libraries far more permeable – spaces where parents can go with or without their children to borrow books.
If I was a headteacher I might timetable library class time at the beginning and end of each school day, and invite parents to choose books with their children. I would also find ways for older children to run these libraries as much as possible, and to also use the space for structured, independent learning. If I was given money to create a new school library, I would find a space that would enable such porosity – maybe just a portakabin in the playground or car park), or some kind of mobile, foldaway library on wheels.
What’s next, beyond school libraries?
Primary school libraries are probably good things. That’s why so many schools choose to have them. They could become even better things with more imaginative approaches to maximise their use and engage families. However, funding good things doesn’t necessarily equate to good policymaking.
Whilst not quite in cones hotline territory, this was a random act of policy kindness, designed to gain the cheapest of positive headlines, and without any clear signalling of broader strategic intent.
It’s a great example of what Michael Gove (lest we forget, the funder of a King James Bible in every school) described last week as the ‘set of disconnected initiatives’ he witnessed at Labour Party conference. Fortunately, this feels like an exception to the more coherent approach outlined by Bridget Phillipson’s speech[iv]. The forthcoming Schools’ White Paper is an opportunity to get beyond cheap funding shots towards tackling some of the most intractable problems in our education system, and making those tough choices (especially around SEND) that, if they have any value, will meet with serious opposition from many parents and organisations. Let’s hope that Labour’s education team have the imagination and the tenacity to be up to the task. And let’s hope I have the imagination and tenacity to be up to teaching Year One PE.
[i] I think academics call this Social desirability bias.
[ii] I wrote about this in 2023, discussing ringfenced funding and centrally funded education programmes
[iii] Here’s an article from 2024 some ideas for spending serious money to improve arts learning
[iv] Although I’m not sure how her line ‘See the light in children’s eyes as Labour’s choices light their world’ survived any kind of speech rewrite.