10 Top Ways to Utilise a School’s Library

1. Resources. Visit the school library and find out what resources are available, e.g. books, ICT, posters, texts to support literacy across the curriculum and collections of resources for topic teaching.

2. Plan. Work with library resources and staff to plan lessons within schemes of work

3. Responsibility. Find out who has responsibility for the library. In a primary school this may be a library co-ordinator and in a secondary school a specialist librarian. These staff will be able to provide information on outside agencies, especially the SLS.

4. Identify. Make use of the school librarians or SLS who can support teachers to identify books and web-based resources in advance of teaching topics.

5. Support. Use a library to support ‘out of hours’ interest or homework clubs.

6. Creative. Use the library as a creative and flexible learning space for project work, individual study and group research.

7. Technology. Use the library to enable students to use technology in practical ways for real research.

8. Enhance. Make use of SLS who can support teachers’ own knowledge of fictional genres, significant authors, current reading trends and non-fiction texts to enhance subject knowledge across the curriculum.

9. Organising. Support pupils in organising their classroom-based research and homework.

10. Success. Celebrate success – displaying pupils’ work within library spaces.