Reflecting on your experiences as a teacher before you became interested in working in a school library, write a 500 word piece about your understandings of the role of the TL in schools.

Thinking about my school experience and the different aspects of being an educator, Teacher Librarians were not overly present in the environments I have worked in.
There was a beautiful library space for the students at my first school, where I completed my NQT year and a subsequent year before moving abroad. However, it was a room that housed books and was not used as a ‘library’ in the sense that children borrowed books to take home. We were fortunate that, as an inner-London school, classes had a vast selection of books readily available, and this is where the students borrowed from. I just remembered about the space when I wrote this reflection! At this time, the concept of a Teacher Librarian was not on my radar and certainly wasn’t a role I acknowledged.

Relocating abroad and joining the Nord Anglia Education network, this school had a similar set-up to my first. Books were on shelves in corridors, classrooms were small, and students were encouraged to read and borrow. Still, no teacher librarian or dedicated staff member was hired to oversee the library spaces. Usage was very much reliant on staff and students, although we did use to take the students and have reading time within the spaces. From my perspective as a class teacher, reading and borrowing books was part of my job description, with recommendations coming from research and fellow staff members.

In Shanghai, I experienced a purpose-built school library with a hired librarian. The space was shared by students from Nursery to Year 13 and had not been censored. We discovered a Year 6 child reading Game of Thrones and had to quickly explain to the teacher, who had yet to read the series, why it was very much NOT appropriate. The local hire librarian had also not read the series and had yet to learn of some of the content. My understanding of her role was that she helped with check-out and check-in, organised the shelves and supported staff with finding books, but she needed to be more involved with student interaction or lesson planning. This became my ‘norm’ of a school librarian role, and I focused on that title rather than teacher librarian as a role, as it was still an aspect I had no experience with.

My current school is the first where a librarian was hired, but who was a teacher, not a qualified librarian. Library sessions were one half-hour session a week per class, and this was the only time the libraries were accessible to the students. The librarian’s role involved general duties and some promotion of library skills and book awards. Still, skills needed to be developed, and the lessons came across as sporadically planned.

In my last position as English Lead, I was shocked at, from my experiences of reaching out to other schools within the NAE network and comparing to other international schools, the lack of understanding and resources placed on the school libraries and the usage of Teacher Librarians and their roles in schools.