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  • 4 weeks later...

My wife is a school librarian in Glasgow and to say she and her colleagues are nervous in case Glasgow follow North Lanarkshire's lead is an understatement. The consensus among them.is other councils will be looking at NL as a test case to see how it goes. Anything to save a bit of money, eh?

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10 hours ago, Craig fae the Vale said:

My wife is a school librarian in Glasgow and to say she and her colleagues are nervous in case Glasgow follow North Lanarkshire's lead is an understatement. The consensus among them.is other councils will be looking at NL as a test case to see how it goes. Anything to save a bit of money, eh?

NLC have been making bold statements about integration with community libraries and widening access to resources. It's nonsense, they want teachers to run the libraries with the help of pupil volunteers and possible occasional input from public librarians. It's never going to work, school libraries will end up closed and the only people missing out will be the pupils.

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9 minutes ago, Baggio said:

NLC have been making bold statements about integration with community libraries and widening access to resources. It's nonsense, they want teachers to run the libraries with the help of pupil volunteers and possible occasional input from public librarians. It's never going to work, school libraries will end up closed and the only people missing out will be the pupils.

I suspect that you're right about the likely execution of this, but proper integration with community libraries would be the best option.

It is daft to separate book resources between two sites (one with closed access to the public). And if school pupils get into the habit of using a community space, then they'll know where to go for education, Internet facilities etc. once they leave school which is not the case at the moment. Which leads to lower use of public libraries, lower education/job prospects and a better excuse for local authorities to shutter community facilities.

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If you started from scratch you would build schools as community hubs with an integrated community/school library as part of that.

One of the difficulties with this is many secondaries (in my context) are nowhere near where people actually live anymore.

The bigger issue is the carve up between the GTC and the Scottish Government to allocate the vast majority of the education budgets to ring fenced teacher posts because of the utterly wrong-headed assertion that "teachers know their kids best" and the politically motivated performance of MOAR TEACHERS.

This means where savings need to be made, and savings need to be made, its the easy targets of youth work, auxiliary staff, pupul and family support workers , third party contract for mental health, drug use, school meals, jannies and libraries which all need to go.

However, before I go cutting front line teaching posts I would ask why teachers with their nationally agreed T&Cs, negotiated with their national unions, overseen by their national registration system, teaching a national curriculum, to help pupils get national qualifications overseen by a national inspection model are even employed by local authorities?

More specifically what do the 32 varieties of performance managers and senior directors of schools actually do given no  seem to have any control or powers of compulsion over their HTs?

 

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56 minutes ago, virginton said:

I suspect that you're right about the likely execution of this, but proper integration with community libraries would be the best option.

It is daft to separate book resources between two sites (one with closed access to the public). And if school pupils get into the habit of using a community space, then they'll know where to go for education, Internet facilities etc. once they leave school which is not the case at the moment. Which leads to lower use of public libraries, lower education/job prospects and a better excuse for local authorities to shutter community facilities.

Community integration is absolutely the way forward, I don't disagree. Ultimately that is NLC's grand plan with ambitious (expensive) town hubs being built across the authority.  I quite often get books for pupils from public libraries and it breaks my heart to see the selection they have that is woefully underused, meanwhile I am replacing books with second hand copies from the community library in Tesco.  

However, that isn't happening any time soon. In addition, school libraries are so much more than just a place to take out books and it is all the other things provided by a trained librarian that can't really be measured on a balanced sheet. 

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On 27/06/2022 at 10:38, ICTChris said:

My memory of our school library is pretty hazy, I think it was good though.  I was recently in the library of the school my wife teaches at and also our local public library and I think the one in my school had more books than both of those.  It also had the internet, which for the mid/late 1990s was pretty cool - you used to have to queue up to use it for five minutes.  There also used to be an area upstairs that only sixth year pupils could go to for study during free periods.

The school has now been knocked down, not sure what the library is like in the new building.

From having a partner in education, this seems pretty par for the course.  There aren't swingeing cuts in one go but things are just gradually reduced and reduced, chipped away at reducing effectiveness until people can't remember that things used to be better.  Luckily enough her school is a 'good school' in that it's in a decent catchment area which mitigates the impact of the cuts but I wonder, as the OP says, what the changes are like for people in places like Castlebrae or WHEC in Edinburgh.
 

This is the last century, no one uses them. Technology is developing very quickly. Recently I even found a personal statement writing service, used https://edubirdie.com/personal-statement-writing-service for that. Soon there will be no need to do anything at all to get an education. Here, take a library, before you had to read 100 books to find information, but now I went in and found what you needed in 30 seconds.

Edited by Donald P. Shew
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