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Warwickshire Schools Library Service (SLS) has recently instituted an award for local schools to enable them to measure their level of service across 20 areas of library activity. Stella Thebridge, Manager, gives us some background to the scheme.
Background
Early in 2012 one of our secondary school librarians asked at a network meeting if we might set up some kind of accreditation scheme for school libraries. There did not seem to be anything of this kind nationally, although there were some broad standards established by CILIP and the SLA which were recommended but not part of such a scheme.
We were a bit unsure at the outset as to what we might be trying to do. We could see the need for a benchmark, but did not want to presume we should be doing this more widely than for our local area. We knew that to try to go national would (quite rightly) involve a huge amount of work to ensure accuracy, clarity and parity. The librarian who raised the issue and her colleagues at the meeting agreed that what they wanted was a certificate in the school foyer' to go alongside curriculum ones and the likes of Arts Mark as some measure of how well the library was doing. They wanted their work to be noticed in the same way.
Goals
After some consultation with these practising librarians and among our own team, we recognised three main outcomes of such an award:
* A process that would lead to recognition of good work in the library
* An award that could be achieved by a wide range of school libraries across both primary and secondary sectors
* An award through which school library workers could cite standards in which their own library fell short, and that could therefore help in applications to Senior Management Team for further resources.
Setting criteria
In the SLS we set about gathering together various standards and recommendations from CILIP, the SLA and also related schemes like the Reading Connects self-assessment process. This last gave us the names for our three levels of achievement:
* Developing
* Establishing
* Enhancing.
It also provided useful activities relating to reading promotion and reader development in libraries, which supplemented the specific library criteria...